CHAPTER THREE

Kieron felt a rush of excitement, but he kept his voice strictly neutral. ‘If you need my help,’ he said, ‘then I’m more than happy to provide it.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ Bex said, laughing at him. ‘You’d cut off your own little finger for the chance to use the ARCC kit again.’

He tried to arrange his features into a wounded expression. ‘Not my little finger. Sam’s, maybe. And only his left little finger.’

Bex got up from her chair. ‘I’ve got to check on Bradley, and then I’m going to arrange some kind of medical evaluation for him that doesn’t depend on some kid’s sister who he has a crush on.’ She smiled to take the sting out of the words. ‘Make yourself useful – put together a dossier on the Goldfinch Institute for me.’

As she vanished out of the living room, Kieron’s fingers were already moving over the virtual keyboard that only he could see. He set searches going on the Goldfinch Institute on not just the normal Internet, but also on the dark web, where all kinds of illegal software could be found and illegal things bought using virtual currency, and on the various highly classified British government databases that the kit could access. Within a few minutes he had pulled together a virtual dossier of information, starting with the company records that were available online, going through blueprints of the facility’s buildings in Albuquerque and staff lists, and ending with a list of the various top-secret projects that the institute was working on for various clients. They seemed to spend a lot of time developing weapon systems, he discovered – not just guns, missiles and bombs but also non-lethal weapons: things designed to stop rioting crowds or bring down armed criminals without causing them any damage. Well, no lasting damage, anyway. Going sideways from some of the information he’d found, chasing links to mainstream sites like Wikipedia, Kieron discovered that there was a surprisingly big debate within the non-lethal weapon community. Some people were happy with the term ‘non-lethal’ while others wanted it replaced with ‘less-than-lethal’ on the grounds that non-lethal weapons sometimes killed people, despite the best efforts of the people firing them. Kieron couldn’t see the point. If you were going to do that, he thought, then why not rename ‘lethal weapons’ as ‘more-than-wounding weapons’, on the basis that sometimes when you fired a gun or dropped a bomb people didn’t die? It was a pointless discussion.

He pulled the various bits of information he’d found into a dossier, then used the capabilities of the ARCC computer – actually a chip somewhere inside the glasses – to index it and provide a table of contents. It even produced a one-page summary, just to make it really easy.

He’d just finished when Bex came back into the room. She was talking on her mobile.

‘Thank you for that – I really appreciate it. Yes, someone will be here to let you in. Don’t worry. Thanks – goodbye.’ Putting the phone back into her pocket, she said, ‘I’ve arranged for a doctor to come and take a look at Bradley. Because she’s private, and because she’s charging us an arm and a leg, there won’t be an information trail for SIS-TERR to follow if anyone there wants to find us.’ She laughed. ‘I think she thinks that we’re criminals and she’s coming to treat a gunshot wound.’

‘Even so,’ Kieron offered hesitantly, ‘I could always wipe her computer records from here, using the ARCC equipment.’

‘You can do that?’ Bex asked, apparently amazed.

‘This kit can do pretty much anything, as long as it’s got a satellite link and can access the web.’

‘Wow.’ She sounded impressed. ‘Let’s hold back on that for now, but keep it in mind. Any luck on producing a fact-file for me on the Goldfinch Institute?’

‘Yeah – do you want me to send it to the printer, or do you want to look at it on the glasses?’

‘The glasses, please. Never good to leave secret information lying around where anyone might see it – including random doctors who get invited in.’

With what he recognised as a slight pang of reluctance, Kieron took the glasses off and handed them to Bex. She slipped them on.

‘You manipulate the information by –’ he started.

‘It’s OK – I’ve done this before,’ she said. She waved a hand, but he wasn’t sure whether she was shushing him or accessing the ARCC system. ‘Bradley and I worked on this together after we left university. We set up a start-up company to fund it, but we got bought out by MI6. They wanted to keep the technology to themselves. That’s how we got involved in the missions – they wanted to keep us close by to act as technical consultants, but we knew more about how to use it than anyone else, so they started giving us things to do.’

She was quiet for a few minutes, and Kieron watched as she moved information around and navigated between virtual screens. Apart from Bradley, in the Newcastle shopping mall the first time Kieron had seen him, and Sam a couple of times, Kieron hadn’t had the chance to watch someone using the ARCC equipment – especially the way it was meant to be used. Bex’s gestures were fluid and precise, like a dancer’s. He wondered how he looked when he was using it. More like a performing bear, he suspected.

‘Oh. Oh no.’

‘What is it?’ he asked, leaning forward. ‘Is the equipment working OK? Your head isn’t hurting, is it?’

‘It is, but not for medical reasons.’ She abruptly removed the ARCC glasses and put them on the arm of the sofa. Her face was creased into a frown. ‘I found something in the information that I really don’t like.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Not your fault, Kieron.’

‘What is it?’

She paused for a few moments, marshalling her thoughts. ‘The idea was that I would travel to Albuquerque under some kind of false identity with my end of the ARCC equipment – the covert end – and investigate the Goldfinch Institute secretly to find out how and why these deaths have occurred, right? Probably put a Trojan virus on their computer system from a USB thumb drive that would hoover up the information we want. Meanwhile, Bradley – or, more likely, you – would provide support and feed me information.’

He nodded. ‘Right.’

‘The trouble is, there’s a name I recognise on the Goldfinch Institute staff list. Tara Gallagher. She’s apparently Head of Security at the Institute, working directly for the boss – Todd Zanderbergen. She used to be with MI6. We shared an office for two years. She’d recognise me straight away. And even if I was in disguise, it’s too much of a risk.’

‘Maybe it’s another Tara Gallagher,’ Kieron suggested.

‘No such luck. I checked her date of birth and her staff photo. It’s definitely her. She looks older, but then I guess I do as well.’ She paused, remembering. ‘We weren’t close and we never kept in touch. I’d heard she’d gone into the army, and then a while later I heard that she’d been recruited into the Royal Marines. I guess she retired and went into independent security. Good choice for a technology company – she’s fearsomely intelligent.’ She sighed. ‘I suppose that blows the whole plan out of the water. There’s no way I can go out there now. It’s just too risky.’

‘What about Bradley?’ Kieron asked. ‘Can he go? I mean, if he doesn’t actually use the glasses at this end – the ones that actually project the information – then he should be OK, shouldn’t he?’

Bex shook her head decisively. ‘I’m not taking the risk of him having another fit or blacking out while he’s undercover. No, I’ll have to tell MI6 that I’m scrubbing the mission. They can give it to someone else.’

‘If they do that,’ Bradley said from the doorway of his bedroom, ‘then we can say goodbye to our jobs. They’ll ask why, you’ll have to admit that I’m ill, and that will spook them. There’s other teams jockeying for top slot. If this job goes to one of them, then we become redundant – figuratively and probably literally. You know what they say – you only turn a mission down once.’

‘Yes, but –’ Bex started to say.

‘We need to keep on top of the pile,’ Bradley carried on, not waiting to hear what she had to say, ‘especially if we want to identify this traitor in SIS-TERR. We can’t let them get suspicious, or think that anything is wrong.’

Bex stared at him. ‘So what do you suggest?’

Bradley shook his head. ‘I hadn’t got that far. Get me better quickly perhaps?’

‘Maybe I could go,’ Kieron said quietly.

‘Or maybe recruit someone else we know,’ Bradley went on. ‘Someone with security clearance we can work with.’

‘I could go,’ Kieron said again.

‘We could maybe recruit a medic who could go with you,’ Bex mused, looking at Bradley. ‘They could make sure you’re OK while you’re working, and treat you if there’s a problem.’

‘Or I could go,’ Kieron repeated, louder. ‘You’re not listening to me.’

Bex sighed. ‘We were listening to you,’ she said. ‘We just didn’t want to hear what you were saying.’

Bradley shook his head. He was still holding onto the door frame with both hands. ‘No – it’s better that I go.’

‘Can you do me a favour?’ Bex asked him. ‘Can you just release your grip on that door frame?’

There was a long silence before Bradley answered. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘If I do that I’ll fall over.’

Bex nodded. ‘I thought as much. Your knuckles are very white. Your whole body weight is being supported by your hands, isn’t it?’

He paused. Kieron assumed he was trying to think of a response that didn’t give away the fact that he was seriously incapacitated. ‘Maybe,’ he said in the end.

Kieron was marshalling a killer argument in his head that would completely nail the discussion when his mobile rang. ‘Sorry,’ he said, pulling the mobile from his pocket, ‘I should have – oh.’ The words on the screen suddenly registered in his brain. ‘It’s my mum. I need to take this.’

‘James Bond’s mum never phones him when he’s on a mission!’ Sam’s voice floated in from somewhere behind Bradley.

Kieron swiped the screen to accept the call as he headed into the bathroom for privacy – and to avoid any more embarrassment. ‘Hello? Mum?’

‘Kieron? You could answer your phone more often, you know? I’ve left seven messages!’

‘You left three messages,’ he pointed out. ‘And one of those was you telling a barista in a coffee shop somewhere that the coffee beans he’d used for your latte were burned. I think you’d pocket-dialled by accident.’

‘They were burned,’ she said defensively. ‘He tried to tell me the coffee was supposed to taste that way, but I wasn’t having it.’ She suddenly seemed to remember that she was supposed to be the one on the offensive. ‘Anyway, where are you? I haven’t seen you for days!’

‘That’s because you come home late and leave early. We hardly overlap.’ Before she could get all apologetic and he could hear the tears lurking somewhere behind her voice, he quickly continued: ‘Not that it matters – I’m fine on my own. Well, not really on my own. I’ve got Sam.’

‘Just Sam?’ she asked. ‘Not that I’ve got anything against him – I love him to bits – but there’s something unhealthy about two goth teenagers spending all their time together. That’s how high-school massacres start. I know – I’ve read it in the newspapers.’

‘We’re not goths,’ he said patiently, for what seemed like the millionth time, ‘we’re greebs. And we’re not going to go round any local Newcastle schools shooting people. Not even with foam bullets fired by springs from brightly coloured plastic guns.’

‘But you have got other friends, haven’t you? And by “friends”, I mean people other than those groups of kids you see hanging around the bus station.’

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘some of those kids in the bus station are my friends, and the only reason we hang around there is that we don’t like coffee and they won’t let us in bars.’ Before she could go on, he added quickly, ‘And, yes, I do have other friends. I’m round their house now, playing on the computer.’ Not too far from the truth, he thought.

‘Oh – anyone I know? What are their names?’

‘Bex and Bradley,’ he said, then immediately started cursing himself. He’d been so tied up with trying to mollify his mother that he’d given out their real names!

‘Bex and Bradley. I don’t know them, do I? Are they from school?’

‘No,’ he said, still trying to think of a way of diverting the conversation. ‘I only met them recently.’

‘And this Bex – short for “Rebecca”, I assume? Are you … interested in her. I mean, more than just friends? Do we need to have a conversation about this?’

‘It’s not like that,’ he said. He felt a slight twang of anxiety somewhere inside his heart. It wasn’t like that with anyone – that was his problem. The closest thing he had to a girl he liked was Sam’s sister Courtney, and not only was she too old for him but she was apparently interested in Bradley. Which was fine. ‘You needn’t worry – we can save that conversation for another time. Or just not have it at all – I’ve been doing biology for years at school. I know all about it.’

‘It’s not the biology I’m worried about – it’s the sociology.’ She paused, and Kieron imagined her shrugging. ‘Well, I hope this Bradley and Bex are decent people. Maybe you could arrange for me to meet their parents. Who knows – we might get on.’ A different, strange tone crept into her voice, and Kieron understood with a slight shock that he must be becoming an adult without realising, because he recognised it as self-pity. ‘It’s not as if I have many friends around Newcastle.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ he said reassuringly, but without the slightest intention of following through. ‘But why don’t you and I try and spend an evening together. We could go out for a pizza, and maybe see a movie. There has to be something we can both watch without one of us wanting to throw up.’

His mum laughed, as he’d hoped. ‘Hey, now that you’ve grown out of Thomas the Tank Engine I think I can cope. I don’t mind superhero movies, or action thrillers.’

‘Let’s do it then,’ he said, and he was surprised to feel a warm, affectionate glow in his chest.

‘I’ll clear an evening,’ she said. ‘Look, you take care of yourself. You’re very precious to me. And you’re growing up so fast. I’m scared I’m going to miss whole chunks of your life.’

‘Love you too.’ Before his mother could get all mushy, he said hurriedly, ‘Gotta go. Let me know when you want to do the pizza-and-movie night.’

‘I will. Make sure you shower, and change your clothes, and brush your teeth properly. Girls don’t like boys who smell of sweat or whose breath stinks.’

And then she was gone. He took a breath, trying to steady himself. He felt as if he was somehow balancing on a thin wall, trying not to fall. One side of the wall was childhood, which he’d enjoyed but grown out of, and the other side was adulthood, which scared and fascinated him in equal measure.

Eventually he slipped the phone back into his pocket and went to join the others.

Bradley had sat down by now, and Sam had joined him on the sofa. Bex was still sitting where she had been when he left. She looked … angry. Frustrated.

‘You’re right, Kieron,’ Bradley said. ‘It has to be you that goes to America to investigate the Goldfinch Institute.’

Kieron felt a swelling sense of happiness and, yes, nervousness. He tried to keep the elation from his face as Bradley went on:

‘There are a great many reasons why it shouldn’t be you, and we’ve gone through most of them in the past few minutes, but in the end it all comes down to three simple facts: the mission needs to be undertaken so that SIS-TERR don’t start getting suspicious about us; Bex’s cover would be blown because she would be recognised instantly by this Tara Gallagher; and I can’t provide Bex with the technical and operational support she needs – not until I’m better.’ He looked as if the words pained him. They probably did. ‘So that leaves us with one simple alternative – you go, and Bex goes with you. She provides the support via the ARCC kit, and you do the investigation.’ His gaze flicked across to Bex, who had her arms crossed and was staring at the wall, then back to Kieron. ‘But at the slightest sign that anything is going wrong, we pull you out. Understood? No heroics.’

‘No crashing trucks, starting fires or electrocuting people,’ Sam added.

‘Not helping,’ Kieron told him. He looked back at Bradley. Bearing in mind the conversation he’d only just had with his mother, he said hesitantly, ‘I know my mum doesn’t spend much time in the flat, but even so, she’s going to realise that I’m not around. And I mean really not around, not just “out with Sam” not around. “In another country” not around.’

Bradley opened his mouth to say something, but Bex interrupted. ‘We’ve talked about that as well,’ she said. ‘You mentioned that your favourite band were rehearsing and recording their new album in Albuquerque?’

‘Lethal Insomnia,’ Sam added helpfully.

‘Yes – Lethal Insomnia.’ The way she said the band’s name made it sound as if there were invisible quotation marks around it. ‘We thought we could invent a fake competition which you’ve supposedly won. Maybe we can say it’s something through a website, or something you entered when you saw a flyer in their last album. We’ll tell your mother that the prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to Albuquerque to see Lethal Insomnia rehearsing their new album. Studio access and tour, three nights in a hotel, all food paid for, plus flights there and back. How could she possibly refuse you permission to go? It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.’

‘She’s not stupid,’ Kieron pointed out. ‘She’ll know that any online competition where a teenager goes to America by himself is likely to be fake.’

‘You’re right,’ Bradley said. ‘We thought we’d make the trip for two. Chances are that your mother won’t be able to take the time off work – you’ve told us about all the overtime she does – but even if she thinks she can, we can get inside her firm’s computer system using the ARCC kit and create some work crisis that means she needs to stay in Newcastle.’

‘She’ll just say I can’t go.’ Kieron’s initial elation was collapsing like a slowly leaking balloon. ‘Not by myself.’

Bradley nodded. ‘But what if we tell her that Bex will go as well, in the guise of someone from the publicity company who ran the competition? She’ll be looking after you all the time, as far as your mother knows.’

Kieron ran the plan through his head. ‘I guess it might work,’ he said cautiously. ‘She’d have to meet Bex of course. She wouldn’t just let me go to America with some woman she’d never seen.’ He glanced across at Bex. ‘And you’d need to stress that this trip would be educational – not just fun. You know – experiencing the sights and sounds of another country, gaining an insight into the music business. That kind of thing.’

‘Maybe,’ Sam said, thinking as he was talking, ‘Bex could tell her that there’s even a possibility that the visit could lead to a job working on the band’s publicity or something here in the UK. You know how she’s worried that you’re never going to get a decent job.’

‘Can we fly first class?’ Kieron asked hopefully.

‘In your dreams,’ Bex snorted.

‘But it is a competition. Winners of competitions usually get treated to first-class travel, and limousines, and all kinds of luxury stuff.’

‘I refer you to my previous answer.’ Bex’s expression was serious. ‘That cover story goes out of the window the moment you say goodbye to your mother. After that, we’ll assume false identities and we’ll just be two travellers flying to New Mexico.’

Sam cleared his throat. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was going to ask about that. If Kieron’s mum isn’t allowed to go – for obvious reasons – maybe I could take her place. I mean, I’ve seen these competitions. My mum cuts them out of magazines and enters them all the time. Our kitchen table is littered with coupons and entry forms. They all say the same thing: “The winner and a friend will travel to” wherever it is.’ He glanced around expectantly. ‘Well, I’m the only friend he’s got. Can I come?’

Bex shook her head. ‘I hate to break this to you, Sam,’ she said, ‘but this is actually work. We’re not really going to see this band recording their album. It’s not actually a competition.’

‘Oh,’ he said, crestfallen. ‘I just thought –’

‘Don’t think. You’re staying here.’

‘OK.’

Bradley raised a hand. ‘I had a thought about what happens when you get there,’ he said. ‘Let me run this past you.’ He paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘We obviously need to be able to get Kieron inside the Goldfinch Institute itself, so he can take a look around. There’s not a lot he – or you – can do from a hotel room, apart from talk to friends and relatives of the people who’ve died and maybe covertly access the autopsy reports, and we can do that from here. What if we give Kieron a reason to be there? What if we give him a fake identity as, oh, say a teenage computer nerd who’s apparently invented a new way of breaking computer encryption, or speeding up processing, or something like that. He’s flown out to Albuquerque to talk to the guy who runs the Goldfinch Institute –’

‘Todd Zanderbergen,’ Bex said.

‘Yes, him. We’ll need to construct the cover story carefully, and make sure Kieron sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, but that’s the kind of thing we do anyway.’ He suddenly looked rueful. ‘The kind of thing I used to do anyway.’ He glanced over at Kieron. ‘Ever done any amateur dramatics?’

‘He was a tree once,’ Sam chipped in, ‘in a school production of Hansel and Gretel.’

‘I did more than that,’ Kieron pointed out, annoyed. ‘I had a starring role in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, and I was also in Ayckbourn’s Ernie’s Incredible Illucinations. I’ve got a lot of stage experience. The only thing you’ve ever done is be the front end of the pantomime horse in Cinderella. And your head fell off.’

‘It wasn’t attached properly,’ Sam objected.

‘OK, that’s all good,’ Bex said firmly. ‘We know what we’ve got to do: firstly, fake a website for this competition; secondly, send a letter to Kieron at his home address telling him he’s won; thirdly, arrange fake passports and travel documents; fourthly, book flights and hotel rooms; and fifthly, if that’s even a word, get in touch with Todd Zanderbergen and arrange an appointment with him. Oh, and sixthly: somehow find something that Kieron can take along and demonstrate that looks as if it might be some cutting-edge software.’ She smiled brightly. ‘All in a day’s work for us.’

‘And seventhly,’ Kieron added, ‘we need to craft some kind of Trojan computer virus and put it on a USB stick.’ He frowned. ‘Maybe we could put a non-disclosure agreement on the USB stick and ask this Todd guy to check it over. When he plugs the stick into his system it’ll copy over. Simple.’

‘I’ll go low-tech and make some phone calls about the travel arrangements,’ Bradley said.

‘Are you sure you’ll be all right doing that?’ Bex asked, concerned.

He nodded. ‘As long as I’m not wearing those glasses, I’m fine. And I’ve got a couple of unregistered “burner” phones I can use that can’t be traced back to us. It’s the software and hardware that Kieron’s going to have to take into the Goldfinch Institute that I’m more worried about.’

‘Actually,’ Kieron said, ‘I think I might have a solution for that. Give me half an hour to do some research.’

Bex and Bradley didn’t look convinced, but were soon busy with their own tasks.

While Bradley went off to get the fake passports organised and Bex logged into her laptop to start mocking-up the fake Lethal Insomnia competition website, Kieron gestured to Sam to come and join him. ‘The Goldfinch Institute is into non-lethal weapons,’ he explained. ‘Their big publicity thing is that they’re trying to move armies and police forces away from lethal measures and more towards things that don’t kill people. If we can persuade them that I’ve developed a really good non-lethal weapon, they’ll be interested in talking to me.’

Sam looked sceptical. ‘You’re going to come up with a completely new type of non-lethal weapon?’ he said. ‘Something that nobody’s ever thought of before? In the next half-hour?’

‘It doesn’t actually have to work,’ Kieron pointed out reasonably. ‘It just has to look like it might. And we don’t have to actually invent it – we just have to find someone who already has, and then steal it from them so we can use it.’

‘Oh,’ Sam said, relieved. ‘For a moment there I thought you were suggesting something impossibly difficult and incredibly risky.’

For the next half-hour the two of them swapped ideas, mainly based on things they’d seen in computer games. They fairly quickly abandoned the crude solutions that most police forces used – solid projectiles that acted like a punch to the stomach or Tasers that delivered an incapacitating dose of electricity to the nervous system. Anaesthetic gases were obviously beyond their capabilities – nobody would believe that a teenager would whip up a batch of anaesthetic gas in his garage. They discussed for a while the ‘vortex ring guns’ Kieron had seen Bex use in Pakistan – weapons that used explosively driven rings of compressed air to knock people over, or knock them out – but they were part of Agni Patel’s arsenal, and Kieron was pretty sure that Bex wouldn’t want him to reveal them.

‘What about sound?’ Sam suggested eventually.

‘What?’

‘Have you ever heard of the “brown note”?’

Kieron shook his head. ‘Don’t think so.’

‘It’s a theoretical musical note below the limit of human hearing that’s supposed to have “an effect” on the body.’

Kieron was dubious. ‘What kind of “effect”?’

Sam smiled. ‘It’s supposed to make you want to – how do I put this? – go to the toilet. Suddenly and uncontrollably.’

Kieron slowly shook his head. ‘I’m guessing it’s not called the “brown note” because it’s like white noise but different?’

‘Oh no. I’ve seen it mentioned on the Internet, and also on TV sometimes. Nobody’s ever identified the note itself, but it would be the perfect non-lethal weapon. And it’s the kind of thing you might find while you were mucking around with a synthesiser or a bass guitar and a big amp.’

‘Yeah. I think we’ll keep that one on the back burner. But thanks.’

‘I suppose you’ve got a better idea,’ Sam challenged.

‘Actually I have.’ Kieron paused. ‘You know how the brain produces electrical brainwaves?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you know that thing we did in physics, where you make ripples in a pond and then make more ripples the same size but one-hundred-and-eighty degrees out of phase, so the peaks of the original sound wave are cancelled out by the troughs in the new ones?’

Sam nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yeah – it’s the principle that noise-cancelling headphones use. They record the background noise of the environment you’re in – like a train or an aircraft – and then play it back a few milliseconds out of phase so it cancels the original sound out.’

‘OK.’ Kieron leaned forward. ‘What happens if you combine the two? If you can record someone’s brainwaves and then play them back out of phase?’

There was a long silence as Sam digested what Kieron had said. ‘It might actually switch the brain off,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I mean, for good. Stop your breathing maybe.’

‘Or it might just suppress your conscious mind and put you into a trance.’ Kieron stared into Sam’s eyes, willing him to buy into the idea. ‘Remember – this doesn’t have to actually work. It just needs to sound like it might.’

‘You know,’ Sam said slowly, ‘this might actually work. We could make a fortune from this!’

‘Baby steps, Sam. Let’s concentrate on the current priority – selling the idea.’

‘OK.’ Sam leaned forward as well, so that his forehead was millimetres away from Kieron’s. ‘How do you record someone’s brainwaves?’

‘Electrodes,’ Kieron replied. ‘Stuck to the scalp.’

‘Easy in a hospital; difficult if you’re facing a guy with a gun.’

‘Right – so how do we make it portable and simple?’ Kieron felt a growing sense of excitement rushing through him as fragmentary ideas started to join up in his brain. ‘We have something like a hairnet, but covered in electrodes. It’s all squished up into a ball. It gets fired at a person from a launcher, and the net unfolds while it’s in mid-air and wraps around their head –’

‘Or it’s like a plastic mesh covered in electrodes that gets warmed up somehow when it’s fired, becomes pliable, folds itself up around the target’s head and then quickly cools down to make a kind of cage.’ Sam shrugged. ‘They use stuff like that for face masks when they give people radiotherapy for brain tumours. They’re moulded to the face, and then bolted down to stop you from moving your head.’ He looked away. ‘My grandad had one. He used to let me play with it. It was purple.’

‘OK,’ Kieron went on, ‘however it’s done, it wraps around the target’s head. There’s a wire connecting it to a device that records the target’s brainwaves and plays them back out of phase, thus rendering them unconscious. It’s genius!’

‘It’s certainly the kind of thing a teenager might come up with. You’d need to convince them that the maths works. You’d also need to show them some kind of prototype. Doesn’t need to actually work – it just needs to look good.’

‘So what do we need?’

Sam thought for a moment. ‘Something appropriately medical. Electrodes, plastic, wires – and maybe an oscilloscope. Oh, and some maths that sounds vaguely convincing.’

‘Where can we get that from?’

Sam considered. ‘I think the kit itself can come from the neurology department of a hospital. They’ll have that kind of thing – I mean, they must record people’s brainwaves all the time.’

‘So – a big hospital then?’

Sam looked dubious. ‘I’m all for a bit of breaking and entering – you know that – but I’m not sure I want to take stuff from a hospital. I mean, what if they need it?’

‘Good point. What if we just borrowed it, and then donated part of the money we’re getting from SIS-TERR?’

‘I could work with that.’

Kieron glanced around the room. Neither Bex nor Bradley were paying them any attention. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that it’s time Bradley took your sister out for a coffee.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Sam said warningly.

Bradley looked up. ‘Did I hear my name being mentioned?’ he asked.

Kieron smiled. ‘We’re thinking of taking a little field trip,’ he said. ‘Want to come?’

It took a good fifteen minutes of arguing and explaining, but eventually the four of them – Kieron, Sam, Bex and Bradley – were outside, getting into the car.

‘I still don’t think this is a good idea,’ Sam muttered as Bex started the ignition.

It took just twenty minutes to get to the Walkergate Hospital. They headed in to the main building and looked for the Programmed Investigations Unit, where Sam’s sister was working. As they headed up in the lift, Bex took over the planning.

‘Sam, Bradley – you head into the unit and look for Courtney. Tell her you wanted to check when she was finishing so you could take her for a meal to thank her for everything. I’ll snaffle a porter’s jacket and a wheelchair from somewhere. When you see me come into the unit, Bradley – you fake an attack of some kind.’

‘Might not be a fake,’ Bradley said. He was, Kieron had to admit, looking a bit pale.

‘While Courtney is sorting you out, I’ll come in with the wheelchair as if I’m collecting someone. Courtney should be distracted enough that she’s only looking at Bradley, but I don’t want her catching sight of me by accident. I’ll take a set of electrodes and an EEG machine. The great thing about hospitals is that everything is labelled so that new nurses can find stuff quickly. While you’re stopping Courtney from turning around, I’ll put the things on the wheelchair and get out of there. Clear?’

‘Clear,’ they all said together.

In the event, it all went like a dream. Courtney was alone in the PIU, as she’d previously told Sam and Bradley.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said, surprised.

Bradley switched into what Kieron assumed was his ‘smooth pick-up routine’. ‘We thought we could take you for dinner when your shift is over,’ he said. ‘As a thank-you for looking after me.’

‘What – all of you?’ she said, glancing at Sam and Kieron.

‘Yes – all of us,’ Sam said firmly.

Bradley smiled. ‘They insisted,’ he added. ‘Bless them.’

‘My shift’s over in half an hour – do you want to wait here for me? We haven’t got any patients in this afternoon.’

Kieron saw, out of the corner of his eye, Bex pushing a wheelchair through the doorway. Before Courtney could spot her, he nudged Bradley in the back.

Bradley raised a hand to his forehead and winced. ‘Actually, I could do with sitting down. Those stairs …’

‘Oh, you didn’t take the stairs, did you?’ Courtney fussed around him, moving him towards a bay with a bed. ‘In your condition?’

‘I thought I was better,’ he protested.

As the three of them helped get Bradley to the bed, Kieron glanced over his shoulder. Bex had moved to a set of cupboards and was opening one. She pulled something out, then glanced at Kieron and nodded. She had it.

Now all they had to do, Kieron thought to himself, was get through dinner without acting suspiciously.