CHAPTER NINE

‘Damn,’ Bex said angrily; ‘this is pointless.’

‘What’s the problem?’ Kieron asked. ‘We know Todd Zanderbergen’s people put the USB stick into their computers. Didn’t the Trojan transfer across, or was it detected by his anti-virus programs and eradicated?’ He was sitting on her bed, watching her work the ARCC kit. Had he really looked that bizarre when he’d been operating it, he wondered?

He glanced at Sam, who had curled himself into the armchair. Bex sat at the desk. ‘Do I really look that lame when I use the kit?’ he murmured.

Sam nodded. ‘Worse.’

‘We’d assumed,’ Bex said grimly, ‘falsely, as it turns out, that the Goldfinch Institute were using a Windows-based operating system on the inside of the company as well as on the outside, in the admin areas. That’s not the case.’

Kieron tried to remember what the PA, Judith, had said when he’d commented on the advanced design of the Goldfinch Institute’s computers. We make them ourselves. Nobody else can buy them. They’re about five years ahead of anything that’s available to the general public.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think Todd’s designed his own operating system. Not Windows, not iOS, not Linux and not Android.’

‘Oh, “Todd” is it?’ Sam muttered. ‘Best friends now.’

‘What does that mean?’ Bex asked, gesturing to Sam to shut up.

Kieron considered for a moment, getting his thoughts in order. ‘If our Trojan was like, say, a normal biological virus, then it would have been expecting a normal human bloodstream as its environment. Put it into a banana milkshake and it wouldn’t be able to function. That’s what Todd’s operating system is: something completely alien to the Trojan.’

Sam licked his lips. ‘I could demolish a banana milkshake right now.’

Kieron sighed. He’d been afraid of this, ever since seeing those computers. ‘Then there’s only one option, isn’t there?’

Bex winced. ‘I can’t ask you to do that.’

Sam looked from Kieron to Bex and back again. ‘What? What am I missing?’

Kieron felt his spirits fall. It was like that feeling of inevitable doom he always got at the dentist’s surgery – the knowledge that what was going to happen next was going to hurt, and there was no way of avoiding it. He was on a road with only one destination. ‘I’m going to have to sneak back into the Institute, log on to one of the computers and get the information we’re looking for the old-fashioned way – by hand.’

Sam looked puzzled. ‘OK – working backwards – how are you going to get past whatever security your mate Todd has on his wonderful bespoke custom-built computer system? That seems to me to be a bit of a showstopper.’

Kieron thought back momentarily to his time in Todd Zanderbergen’s office, gazing out at the people who worked for him, and his time touring the site. ‘Todd’s got what he thinks are a perfect pair of security measures,’ he said, pulling his thoughts together as he spoke. ‘The first one is that he has two layers of computers that aren’t connected to each other – the administrative ones, which only communicate with the outside world, and the work ones, which are networked within the Institute but have no contact outside. That means a hacker or virus can get into the first layer, but no further. The second level of security is that the computers on the inside are all built by the Goldfinch Institute and run a unique operating system of his own design. Even if a hacker or virus does get in, it wouldn’t be able to function.’

‘The banana-milkshake problem,’ Sam said, nodding.

‘Indeed. And the strength of the security also provides its flaw. I watched as some of Todd’s people arrived at their computers and started work. They didn’t type any passwords in. Todd is so convinced that nothing or nobody can get to that second layer and use it that he hasn’t implemented any security on it at all.’ He sniffed. ‘He probably dresses that up in some kind of caring, sharing language, saying that he wants all of his staff to have access to everything, so they feel trusted. In fact I think he said something like that while I was there.’

‘OK,’ Sam said, ‘if you can get in and access his “special” machines, then you can look for the information we need. How are you going to do that then?’

‘Sam’s right,’ Bex said. ‘I was wondering that too.’

‘That’s the trick,’ Kieron said. ‘Physical security at the Institute is managed using iris-recognition technology. The iris of each person’s eyes has a unique pattern of blood vessels. Staff going in through the main fence and into the buildings are recognised by their eye-print. We just have to use someone’s eye-print to get us in.’

‘Uh,’ Sam said, a wary expression on his face, ‘if that means what I think it means, count me out. I’ve seen that film, and it didn’t end well. Gross.’

‘We’re not going to cut someone’s eye out and use it,’ Kieron explained patiently. ‘We’re going to record their eye-print. Or, rather, we already have.’

‘All that time you spent looking into Judith’s eyes and smiling!’ Bex said as the realisation struck her; ‘you were letting the ARCC system get a good look at her irises.’ She paused. ‘Doesn’t explain why you got such a good look at her bum.’

‘What?’ Sam said. ‘You’ve got that recorded as well! Let me see!’

Kieron felt his cheeks getting hot. ‘That was accidental!’ he protested. ‘I was behind her, and I was looking at the floor to make sure I didn’t trip over anything.’

Before Sam could continue, Bex held up her hands. ‘OK, be that as it may, I think I can see another flaw in your scheme. We might have a recording of Judith’s eye-print, but what do we play it back on? You can hardly hold a laptop with a picture of an eye up to the scanner. Someone would notice.’

‘The resolution’s too low anyway,’ Kieron said. His stomach felt filled with lead. ‘Same applies to tablets, and to printout. The image has to be eye-sized, but 4K resolution.’

‘So we’re stuck,’ Sam challenged. ‘Unless you’re going to chat this Judith up and persuade her to take you back in.’ His face twisted, and he looked down at the ground. ‘You get to do all the fun bits.’

‘There’s only one way I can think of to get an eye-print at the right level of resolution,’ Kieron said quietly.

‘I forbid it,’ Bex said, standing up.

Sam glanced between them. ‘I’m missing it again. Tell me!’ As neither of them spoke, he suddenly slapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Of course – the ARCC kit!’

‘I repeat,’ Bex said, low but forceful, ‘I forbid it.’

‘We have no choice,’ Kieron pointed out, wishing he could just accede to her order but knowing that he couldn’t. ‘The glasses I’ve been wearing don’t have the ability to project images on the lenses. That’s so nobody I’m talking to, or standing behind me, can see the image reflecting from them, which would give away the fact that they’re special. Only the glasses you’re wearing can do that. And we both know that those glasses have the highest image resolution it’s currently possible to get. They have to, because the images are so small. So – I take your glasses and use them to show Judith’s retinal image to the scanners.’

‘At least you can leave your ones behind,’ Bex said reluctantly, ‘so we can keep in contact.’

Kieron shook his head. ‘Best if I take them as well. There’ll be a lot of data being flashed up, and I’ll need a way of recording it. We already know I can’t put a USB stick in Todd’s “special” machines, or email myself a file from them, because they’re bespoke systems behind a massive firewall.’

Bex made a frustrated ‘tch,’ sound as she thought the logic through, but she nodded.

‘But that means,’ Sam said, working through the chain of logic, ‘that you’ll have the glasses Bex would have used to give you operational support, as well as the ones you’ve been using. You’ll be going in there with nobody at your back. And if you don’t come out, if you get caught, we won’t know what’s up or what you’ve found out.’

‘It’s a risk,’ Kieron said.

‘An unacceptable one,’ Bex insisted.

Kieron shook his head. ‘We have to do this. It’s the job.’

‘Not your job! And I promised your mother I’d look after you.’

‘You were undercover,’ Kieron pointed out. ‘Promises made undercover don’t count. We have to do this. I’ve thought through all the options, and there’s no other solution. We have to do it this way.’

He watched as Bex closed her eyes tight, as if she had a headache or was trying to brace herself for something unpleasant. ‘OK,’ she said eventually, and softly. ‘Have it your way. Take both pairs. But be careful, be quick and don’t take any unnecessary risks.’

‘I’m a coward,’ Kieron reassured her. ‘I’ve spent most of my childhood running away from bigger, stronger kids, and kids who don’t like the clothes I wear or the music I listen to. I would never take any unnecessary risks with my life. I’m not even keen on taking necessary ones.’

There wasn’t much preparation. Sam suggested going out and buying some hair dye, or a red wig, so they could make Kieron look like everyone else who worked for Todd Zanderbergen, but Bex pointed out that they didn’t have time, and besides, they probably had local contractors and workmen popping in all the time who had different-coloured hair. Sam joined them in the car, and Bex stopped at a drive-through burger place so at least he and Kieron had something to eat. She didn’t have anything herself. Kieron thought he heard her mutter something like, ‘I’d rather stick knitting needles in my eyes.’ In fact, he thought it was the tastiest bacon cheeseburger he’d ever had.

The drive to the Goldfinch Institute took about half an hour. It was getting late, and they hit the tail end of the rush-hour traffic. Kieron used the journey to work with the ARCC glasses, making an enlargement of Judith’s right eye and making sure that it showed up nice and clearly in the image in the lenses. She did, he had to admit, have beautiful eyes.

By the time they got to the patch of tarmac outside the gates, nobody was around. The sun had gone down, leaving a red and purple stain spreading upwards from the horizon. The light reflected off the glass bulk of the buildings, casting a fiery glow across the sand.

‘What if people are working late?’ Sam asked from the back seat.

‘Judith told me that most of the employees have a special bus that picks them up in the centre of town and brings them out here, then drops them off again in the evening. That’s apparently because Todd is trying to cut down on vehicle emissions, but an added bonus is that it means people all have to leave at the same time, so they can get a ride home.’ He smiled. ‘It also means that Todd knows that nobody is getting in late or leaving early. He’s a bit of a control freak.’

‘I bet he doesn’t use the bus,’ Sam said.

‘No – he’s got a Harley-Davidson bike.’

‘Still,’ Sam pressed, ‘security guards? Cleaners? They might see you.’

‘And they’ll think I’m allowed to be there, on the basis that I obviously got past the eye scanners.’

Kieron took a deep breath. ‘Having said that, if you guys hang around here for long, the guard will get suspicious. I’d better go.’

‘Good luck,’ Bex said. Sam just punched him in the back. ‘I’ll stay nearby, and I’ll swing past every half-hour to see if you need to be picked up.’

Kieron got out of the car and walked towards the security turnstile, making sure that he was wearing one set of the ARCC glasses – the recording and transmitting ones – and holding the others – the ones that had the laser projectors to place images on the inside of the lenses. He turned and waved ostentatiously at the hire car, as if it was his mum who’d dropped him off. As he approached the turnstile, and as he heard the car drive away, with Bex beeping her horn in what hopefully sounded like a fond farewell, a security guard popped his head out of the cabin. It was a different guy to the one who’d been on earlier.

‘You OK, sir?’ he called. ‘Working late?’

‘Conference call with Europe,’ Kieron called back, trying to approximate an American accent. ‘They don’t keep the same hours as us.’

‘Really?’ The guard looked puzzled. ‘Why not?’

‘Search me!’ Kieron gulped as he realised that that was the very last thing he wanted the guard to do. ‘Have a good evening!’

‘You too, sir.’ The man disappeared, and Kieron held the ARCC glasses in his hand up to the scanner, muttering a quick prayer under his breath. The scanner was just a simple weatherproof box with a circular grey rubber ring on the front designed to cup the eye socket. It also had the convenient side effect of concealing his head from anyone in the guards’ cabin.

Nothing happened.

He pushed at the turnstile, in case it had released silently, but it didn’t budge.

He panicked, and pulled the glasses away and then put them back against the rubber ring, just in case.

Still nothing happened. No click, no movement in the turnstile. He looked around for a keypad. Had he missed a keypad? Was there a code that needed to be typed in as well?

No keypad. Why would there be, when the person’s eye was actually there, and the security guard could check that they weren’t being forced to operate the turnstile by someone else?

What was he doing wrong?

He looked at the glasses in his hand, and suddenly realised. He’d been holding them up as if there was a face behind them, with the outward curve of the lens next to the scanner, but the projected image was on the inside, of course. Quickly he turned the glasses over, and pressed the inside of the lens against the rubber ring.

He heard a quiet click. This time when he pushed the turnstile, it began to turn.

Within moments he was inside the outer fence. The second scanner, on the second inner fence, worked just as quickly, now he knew what he was doing.

The second turnstile worked just as smoothly as the first, and he began to walk towards the nearest building. Nobody else was around, but he had the feeling that someone was watching him from behind the mirrored glass. Someone who was waiting for him to get within range before they struck.

He followed the same route the golf buggy had taken him that morning – down glass canyons to the central building, where Todd’s office was located. He could probably do what he needed to do from any computer in any building on the site, but he felt safer on territory he’d already seen.

The door to the main block didn’t swish open for him until he used the glasses for a third time, on a scanner just to one side. An additional level of security when most people had left, he supposed.

He walked past the deserted reception desk to the hidden doors of the lifts. When one slid open, he stepped inside and said, ‘Fifth floor, please,’ and then cursed himself for adding the ‘please’. How British could you get – being polite to a lift?

When he stepped out on the fifth floor he consciously stopped himself from saying thank you.

Todd’s glass-walled office was deserted – thank God. Kieron wondered briefly if he should actually use Todd’s computer, but he might disturb something that Todd would spot. Best use another desk. As far as he could tell, all the staff hot-desked. There were no knick-knacks, photographs or even pens and pencils on the desks to disturb. They were completely characterless.

He sat on the nearest ball, and bounced a couple of times experimentally. On another day, in another place, he and Sam could probably have fun on those things, but not now and not here, he told himself sternly. Now that he had got through the security, he was beginning to enjoy himself.

The computer sat there, looking subtly different from anything he’d seen before. Maybe it was the aspect ratio of the screen – tall and thin, rather than short and wide. Or maybe it was the material the case was built from, which looked more organic than artificial – compressed hemp maybe, knowing Todd.

Tentatively he switched it on.

A scattering of tiny motes of light appeared on the screen, swirling in apparent random motion that slowly resolved itself into a movement towards the centre. There they formed an image of Todd Zanderbergen’s face and the words Goldfinch Institute – Secure System.

He glanced at the desk. Keyboard, yes, but no mouse. In its place sat a circular grey pad. Probably a trackpad. Wireless, apparently, as it had no cable – just like the keyboard. If he ran his fingers across it, a pointer should appear on the screen. Should.

The picture on the screen had changed now to something that looked like a blend of the Windows, iOS and Android home screens: icons set against a background that seemed to show a close-up of a rock face complete with cracks and patches of orange lichen.

He scanned the icons. They seemed to be fairly standard – file explorers, word-processing programs, spreadsheets and so on. So far, so basic.

Experimentally Kieron played around with the computer, moving the pointer (crosshairs rather than an arrow) testing the trackpad and opening up various programs. The underlying logic of the system was no different from any other operating system he’d ever used: the cake was the same, even if the icing and decoration were different.

It took him about half an hour to find his way to the Goldfinch Institute’s personnel records. They took the form of a fairly comprehensive database containing all the information one might possibly want to know about every person who had ever worked there and several things that nobody would ever want to know – name, address, date of birth, date of joining the company, date of leaving the company (if appropriate), salary, passport numbers, driving licence, criminal convictions, credit score, race, sexual orientation, status and number of partners and of children, favourite colour, score on several popular personality tests … Kieron had suspected Todd Zanderbergen had control issues, and this confirmed it. He seemed to want to know everything.

Swapping the passive ARCC glasses for the active ones, he quickly checked the information Bex had obtained from the medical examiner’s office. Unfortunately he had no way of transferring the information from the glasses to the Institute’s computer, so he had to type the names in by hand and check them against the database. It took him another half an hour, but eventually he had a list.

He scanned the screen intently.

Yes, the thirty-five employees who had died of heart attacks on the Goldfinch Institute premises last year were all listed. Very neatly, with no emotion. Kieron looked down the list of names – each one of which, he had to remind himself, was a real person, with friends, relatives, loved ones. He searched for any common thread, any similarity that might explain why they all died in the same way at the same place and time.

And he discovered something. Actually, two things.

The first was that each one of those thirty-five employees was listed as having died not at the Goldfinch Institute premises in Albuquerque, which is what the medical examiner’s records had said, but at one of the Institute’s research laboratories – specifically one just outside Tel Aviv, in Israel. Kieron hadn’t even realised the Goldfinch Institute had a facility in Israel. It hadn’t been flagged up on any of the information he’d researched for Bex a few days before. But that’s where they’d all died.

The second one – and this took a while to spot – was that each one had Eastern European heritage. It was the names that gave it away on some of them – lots of surnames ending in -ski, -vitch, -vic, -nvotny, –iak and suchlike. Once he’d spotted that, checking the others revealed that although their names seemed neutral, they had Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian or some other Eastern European parents or grandparents but had changed their names, either through marriage or to fit in better in America.

Thirty-five deaths, all of employees of the same company, all of the same cause, all in the same place, and all with families originating from Eastern Europe. What were the odds? What did it all mean?

He leaned back in his seat, almost overbalancing when he realised that there was no back to it and he was sitting on an inflated ball. He regained his balance by flailing his arms around and throwing his weight forward so that he fell across the keyboard.

‘Thank God there wasn’t anyone around to see that,’ he said.

‘That,’ a voice said behind him, ‘is where you’re wrong.’

It felt as if someone had poured freezing cold water from a jug, along with the ice cubes, down Kieron’s back. He turned slowly. The stability ball squeaked as he moved, ruining the cool, smooth effect he’d been trying to achieve.

Tara Gallagher stood behind him, a security guard on either side of her. They were armed, and their hands were on their weapons.

‘If I said I thought I’d left something behind and I’d just popped back to get it, would you believe me?’ he asked. On the outside he was being flippant, but on the inside he was panicking. Not only had he been caught red-handed, but he had no way of letting Bex know what had happened. He had both sets of ARCC glasses.

That thought prompted him to remove the pair he was wearing and slip them casually into his jacket pocket, next to the other set. He didn’t want Tara noticing anything strange about them.

‘That depends,’ Tara said unsmilingly. ‘What did you leave behind?’

‘A cufflink? My mobile?’ He shifted on the inflatable ball. It squeaked loudly. ‘My self-respect?’

‘Oh, I’m not sure you had any self-respect when you first came in here,’ she said. ‘I told Todd you were too young and that this was some kind of set-up, but he didn’t believe me. He was too enthralled by the wonderful product you were trying to get him to invest in.’

‘If it helps,’ Kieron said, ‘I do think it’ll actually work.’ His mind raced, trying to find some way out of this situation.

‘I’ll be sure to tell Todd that. He can take the idea off your dead body and exploit it himself.’ Finally she smiled. ‘He’ll probably want to name it after you. He’s such a sentimentalist. I’ll advise him not to though. Why celebrate the people you’ve had to crush in the course of business? They should rot in obscurity. Safer that way.’

‘And does that apply to the thirty-five people of Eastern European heritage who died of heart attacks in Israel while working for the Goldfinch Institute?’ Kieron asked. He didn’t expect an honest answer, but he wanted to distract and delay Tara and the guards for a few precious moments.

She shook her head. ‘You’ve watched too many movies,’ she said. ‘You think I’m just going to explain everything to you. I’m not.’

‘But you’re not going to kill me,’ Kieron pointed out. Just past Tara he could see the lifts. The light above one of them had lit up, indicating that someone was using it. Maybe they were travelling to a lower floor, or maybe they were coming to the fifth floor, where Kieron, Tara and the guards were located. Maybe it was Todd Zanderbergen, arriving to gloat, or maybe it was someone else. He didn’t know, but there was a chance it might provide a distraction. Just the faintest chance.

‘Why am I not going to kill you?’ Tara seemed genuinely interested in his answer.

‘Because if you were, you’d have done it already. You’re keeping me alive so that you can question me – find out why I’m here and who I’m working for.’

‘You know the thing about non-lethal weapons?’ Tara asked. Before Kieron could answer, she answered her own questions: ‘They hurt. Some of them hurt a lot. Take the microwave skin heater you saw earlier. That one really hurts. You’ll tell me what I want to know, and you’ll do it very quickly; I have no doubt about that, no doubt at all.’

Kieron saw, beyond the armed guards, the lift doors slide silently open. Someone stepped out – a cleaner, holding what looked like some high-tech version of a vacuum cleaner. He obviously wasn’t expecting the lights to be on. Blinking, he spotted the little group.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I’ll come back.’

Tara and the two guards spun around, surprised. As they did so, Kieron stood up, grabbed the ball he’d been sitting on and threw it at the guard to Tara’s left. Before it even hit he’d scooped up the wireless trackpad and skimmed it like a Frisbee towards the other guard. The ball hit the first man and bounced, unbalancing him, as the trackpad caught the second guard in the throat. He started choking.

No time to run to the lifts. Where could he go?

He did the last thing Tara and the guards expected. Instead of running for the lifts and stairwell, he ran in the other direction – towards Todd’s office, in the centre of the building.

He got there just as he heard Tara behind him saying, ‘He’s trapped himself, the fool! Get him!’

He dashed across the office and scooped up the microwave skin heater from the glass display table. He wouldn’t have thought to use it, except for Tara’s mention of the weapon. Non-lethal, but extremely painful.

As he turned he saw the two guards rushing into the office.

He hefted the weapon, pointed it at them and pressed the trigger.

It only occurred to him then that it might not have had a power pack inside, or, worse, it could have been a model rather than the real thing, but his fears were unfounded. He knew that because the moment he activated it the two guards stopped as if they’d run into a brick wall. Their eyes widened and they started slapping at their clothes as if they were on fire.

Kieron stepped towards them, still firing. The weapon was easy to operate – almost instinctive. Good design, he thought. They backed away rapidly through the doorway. One man tried to go left while the other one went right, but Kieron herded them with the invisible beam of energy so that they both went in the same direction – towards Tara.

One of the guards tried to make a break for it, running away to one side, but Kieron used the weapon to make a wall of pain ahead of him. He quickly doubled back towards his friend.

It was like using a hosepipe to move sheep around, Kieron thought, and started to giggle.

The edge of the beam caught Tara, and she squealed.

Bit by bit, Kieron moved the two guards and the Head of Security to one side, giving him a clear run to the stairwell. He thought their skin was starting to go red, although that might just have been the pain, the exertion and the embarrassment of having a teenager shepherding them around. One of the guards tried to pull his gun, but Kieron had already spotted a dial near where his other hand supported the barrel of the weapon. He turned the dial, and the guard started screaming. When the man took his hand off the butt of his gun, Kieron turned the dial down again.

Tara’s expression combined pain and fury in equal measure.

Kieron backed through the fire door into the stairwell. The moment the door closed, he sprinted down the stairs, still carrying the weapon. He had to get to the bottom before they did. He guessed Tara and one of the guards would take the lift while the other guard followed him down the stairs.

He passed the doors to the fourth, third and second storeys, expecting at each one to have someone jump through and try to grab him. Nobody did. He almost missed the exit due to the fact that Americans had first floors where English people had ground floors. He’d run past it and down the steps to the basement, wasting precious seconds, before he realised and went back.

The first floor housed the reception lobby. Instead of heading straight out through the doors Kieron went in the other direction, seeking a back exit. He assumed that Tara would have already notified the guard on the main gate to stop him, so he had to either find another way past the security fence or hide out somewhere and come up with a way to alert Bex to his situation.

A door next to the lifts led along a corridor to exactly what he wanted – another way in and out of the building.

And outside the door, in a covered parking area surrounded by blue glass walls and roof and with a tunnel leading to the outside, stood four Harley-Davidsons. Todd Zanderbergen’s toys.

Kieron had ridden a motorbike twice before, both times on waste ground near where he lived in Newcastle. He vaguely knew how. He also thought he knew, from computer games rather than real life, how to hot-wire one. Quickly he put the microwave weapon on the floor, straddled one of the motorcycles and followed the three wires from the handlebars to a plastic firing cap. He pulled the firing cap apart and was left holding a piece of plastic with three square holes in it, with the wires leading away into the engine. He needed a loose piece of wire now. Glancing around, he cursed. This place was just too tidy. Trust him to try to steal a bike from a man with control issues.

But he did have the visitors’ instructions Judith had given him earlier. They were held together by a metal staple. He pulled the folded bits of paper from his jacket and tore the pages away until he was just holding the staple. He straightened it, then bent it again into a curve.

And he rammed it into the two holes in the firing cap that would make a connected circuit.

As his thumb touched the ignition button on the handlebars something swished past his head and hit a glass wall with a loud splat!

Reflexively he turned his head to look. A football-sized mass of blue goo slowly slid down the glass, but it was drying as he watched, hardening into a distorted teardrop-shape, its surface turning into a crazy-paving of hard skin with still-liquid goo oozing between the cracks like lava.

He glanced sideways. Tara Gallagher stood in the tunnel that led out, to freedom. She held a massive bazooka-like gun in both hands: a tubular barrel large enough to fire tennis balls, with a chunky stock and a tube leading to a tank strapped to her back. Kieron didn’t know where she’d got it from, but he knew what it was. He’d seen it demonstrated on the Goldfinch Institute video that he’d been forced to sit through in their conference room that morning. It fired a ball of quick-hardening plastic material. The intention was to incapacitate rioters bearing weapons; stop them from committing further acts of violence.

And they were using it against him.

Tara smiled wolfishly. ‘Stick around, kid,’ she said, and fired again.

Kieron jabbed his thumb on the ignition button. The Harley roared into life and he gripped the handlebars and twisted the accelerator hard. As the bike jerked and then leaped forward he saw a blue projectile emerge from the barrel of the weapon, trailing a tail behind it and looking like some kind of mutant tadpole from a horror film. The weapon bucked so hard in Tara’s hand that the projectile shot past Kieron’s head and splattered on the blue glass ceiling of the tunnel. It spread out into a thin layer from which blue tentacles started to descend before they set hard into icicle-like spikes. As he careened beneath them he heard them snapping like tiny bells.

The Harley seemed to buck beneath him like a living animal, and then he was speeding through the tunnel. It felt as if the motorcycle was in charge, not him. It was all he could do to stay in the saddle. The fact that he was half reclining in a kind of dentist’s chair position didn’t help.

The roar of the Harley’s engine echoed back from the glass walls of the tunnel, filling the space with sound. Moments later he was out into the night, careering along between slanted walls of blue glass. Glancing left he saw another rider on another motorcycle, this one on some kind of platform a metre or so above him. He seemed to be leaning over, towards Kieron. His teeth were clenched hard and his hands were clamped on the motorcycle’s handlebars with professional-looking skill. And then he realised. This wasn’t another rider; this was him, reflected in the slanted glass. He looked so competent, so aware of what he was doing, that Kieron felt a sudden burst of confidence. If his reflection could do it, so could he.

Looking right he noticed another reflection. Three Kierons, three bikes, all moving together like a formation team. All working as one.

Up ahead the two glass walls he was speeding between ended at a crossroads where four buildings met. Kieron cursed. There’d been a map of the Institute in the reception lobby earlier, but like a fool he hadn’t thought to memorise it. Yes, the ARCC glasses had faithfully recorded the image, but he wasn’t going to stop now and check for directions. He had to make a decision.

He slowed, and slewed the bike so that when it got to the junction he’d be facing left. Small stones sprayed up from beneath his tyres. He skidded out past the edge of the building and found himself staring straight down another glass canyon, heading who knew where.

A football-sized blue mass hit the building by his shoulder.

Tara.

The goo splattered like a dropped bowl of porridge, sending tendrils in all directions. As he watched, it started to harden.

He twisted the accelerator and headed down this new channel. His engine noise, magnified, echoed back from the glass, deafening him.

Another junction up ahead – this one with just one alternative route, off to his right. Turn, or keep going?

Turning would take a precious few seconds but it would disguise his course. If he kept on riding straight then Tara, when she came around the last corner, would see him and be able to report where he was heading, maybe set up a roadblock. He slowed, twisted the handlebars right and leaned with the curve. The Harley obeyed his instructions perfectly. He had exerted dominance.

He slid into the junction, ready to accelerate, but something was wrong. For a moment he thought that he was looking directly at his own reflection in a glass wall, but that wasn’t it. This wall must be straight, not slanted, because the reflection wasn’t tilted.

And it was still coming at him, even though he’d slowed for the turn.

It wasn’t a reflection: it was another Harley. One of the guards must have taken another of Todd’s bikes. Or been told to take it by Tara.

Kieron couldn’t haul his bike back in time to keep going down the path he’d just come off. The bike was too heavy. He only had one choice.

He gunned the throttle again and accelerated straight at the oncoming bike.

The guard wasn’t wearing a helmet. His features had contorted into a snarl, but Kieron wasn’t sure if it was the speed of the air against his face that had forced it into that expression or whether he was just really, really angry.

The two bikes headed for each other at catastrophic speed.

At the last second, Kieron twisted his handlebars. His bike veered left and mounted the slanted glass wall. Like a trick rider, he was defying gravity, riding on the glass rather than the ground. It seemed strong enough to take the weight – for now. As the two Harleys passed each other in opposite directions, everything seemed to be in slow motion, and Kieron realised they were so close he could have reached out and tweaked the other rider’s ear. And then they’d passed each other and time returned to normal speed. Kieron steered right and his bike obediently came back to flat earth again.

The other rider wasn’t so lucky. Kieron heard a banshee screech of brakes, then a crash! so loud that it overpowered even the roar of the two engines. The bike had run straight into the wall, and the glass hadn’t been strong enough to withstand this direct assault. As Kieron drove away he heard a distant whoomph! as petrol spilling from the tank ignited.

Now that there was nothing in his way Kieron could see that the channel between the buildings ahead of him ended not in another featureless glass wall but in a patch of open ground and a section of chain-link fence. It was a glimpse of freedom. Yes, he still had the two fences to negotiate, but that was a problem he could worry about in, oh, say, thirty seconds’ time. His task now was to get there, alive and in one piece. One problem at a time.

The ends of the two buildings forming his channel were just three bike lengths ahead when a door in the right-hand wall abruptly opened and Tara Gallagher stepped out. She was breathing hard, having run through several buildings to get there, and she held the goo gun in her hands. She aimed it and fired – not at Kieron, but at the front wheel of his Harley. The sticky foam hit the spinning spokes and splattered in all directions, but some of it had stuck. As Kieron zoomed past and saw Tara swing the weapon like a club at his head, he also noticed that his bike was suddenly moving much slower than it should have been. It was like driving through thick mud.

Before Tara could fire at his back and incapacitate him, Kieron slammed on the brakes. The front wheels locked and he threw his weight forward, standing up on the foot supports. Momentum caused the rear end of the bike to rise up in the air, shielding Kieron from Tara’s next shot but propelling him over the handlebars. For a long moment he hung in mid-air, but then gravity prevailed and he hit the ground, rolling over and over, feeling the skin on his hands and his back scraping against small stones.

To anyone standing outside, by the fence, it would have seemed as if Kieron had suddenly been fired out of the gap between the buildings like a bullet from a gun.

He lost count of the number of times he rolled, but one thought dominated his mind: the fence he was heading towards was electrified! If he hit it, he would die!

He twisted as he rolled, so that his feet were ahead of him, and then he dug his heels into the ground, slowing him, but not enough. The wires were just two metres away from him now. Desperately he splayed his hands and clawed his fingers into the earth.

He stopped with his face just inches from the deadly wire.

Exhausted, battered and mentally frozen, he took a breath to steady himself. All he wanted to do was lie down and rest, but something kept him going. It was the knowledge that he still had a job to do.

He suddenly realised that the tarmacked area where Bex had dropped him earlier was just off to his right, beyond the two fences. It was empty of cars. The security turnstiles and the cabin by the gates were there too, but the cabin’s door swung open and he could see nobody inside. The guard had probably been called out to help in the chase. If Kieron could reach the turnstiles, he might be able to get through – if the ARCC glasses with Judith’s iris image stored in their memory hadn’t been broken in the crash and if the turnstiles hadn’t been locked in a security crackdown.

His right hand pulled Bex’s glasses from his jacket pocket and his legs twitched as his subconscious tried to persuade the rest of him to run towards the turnstiles, but in his conscious mind he knew that the game was up. Tara was clever: she would have locked the site down by now.

Which meant that Kieron needed to do something else.

He glanced over his shoulder. It had only been a few seconds since the crash, although it seemed much longer. Nobody else had emerged from the gap between the buildings, but they would, any moment now, he had no doubt.

Quickly checking that he’d pulled the correct pair out, and he wasn’t about to throw the ones he thought of as ‘his’ set, Kieron flung the ARCC glasses with all his strength. They sailed above the first fence, but Kieron had always been terrible at cricket and rounders at school, and his lack of muscles and co-ordination showed. The glasses reached the top of their arc somewhere between the two fences and began their inevitable descent. He wasn’t sure if they would make it over the second fence. If they didn’t, they would be trapped between them.

‘So, Ryan,’ came Tara’s voice from behind him, ‘Todd will not be happy with you.’

Kieron turned. ‘I take it the Lethal Insomnia trip is off?’ he asked, loudly enough to disguise the sound of the glasses landing. He thought he heard them hit tarmac rather than sand, but he wasn’t sure.

‘Three Harley Davidsons totally wrecked,’ Tara said. She walked towards him, keeping the huge weapon pointed at him. ‘Quite a score.’

‘I only counted one wrecked, and one goo-ed up,’ he objected.

She grimaced. ‘The one that you “goo-ed up” –’ she started to say, but he interrupted her.

‘You goo-ed it up, not me.’

‘Children,’ she muttered, then, louder: ‘The one that was goo-ed up, by people yet to be established, will take a lot of restoration to get the scratches out. And the goo has an unfortunate corrosive effect on metal. A lot of the parts will need to be replaced. The second bike drove into a glass wall and burned up, while the third was driven into the security fence at the far side of the Institute by a guard who’d never ridden a bike before and didn’t know what he was doing.’

‘You can’t blame me for that last one,’ Kieron protested. ‘And frankly the other two are a bit of a stretch.’

‘It’s not up to me,’ she said, raising the goo gun so that it pointed at his face. ‘Todd will not be happy about this. One of them was a customised Hardtail Bobber, one was ridden by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape and one was ridden by Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. Those last two are the very definition of “irreplaceable”.’

Things had got very confusing for Kieron. He felt as if he’d been pummelled all over his body; his head hurt, the scratches on his hands and his back stung, and he seemed to be expected to keep his end up in an increasingly bizarre conversation.

‘I think I saw The Great Escape a few years ago, at Christmas,’ he said weakly. ‘I’ve never seen Easy Rider.’

‘Of course you haven’t,’ Tara said dismissively. ‘You’re only a kid, and they haven’t done a big-budget remake with CGI.’ She sighed. ‘Both films – all the good guys die. It’s just like real life. Now brace yourself – this won’t be pleasant.’

Kieron stared down the barrel of her weapon. ‘You’re not going to fire that at my face, are you? It’s meant to incapacitate, not choke, surely?’

‘Normally I’d aim it at your arms or legs,’ Tara admitted, ‘but you’ve annoyed me.’

‘You said it corrodes metal! What about skin?’

‘Let’s find out,’ she said. And pulled the trigger.