2

Connor allowed himself a quiet smile of satisfaction. Against all the odds, he’d done it. He’d saved his Principal. Then Amir turned to him, and the smile was wiped from his face. Planted squarely in the right eye of Amir’s goggles was the red splat of an exploded paintball.

“How come you got hit?” Connor exclaimed, clambering into the passenger seat and thumping the armrest in frustration. “I had you covered on all sides.”

Amir tenderly peeled off his safety goggles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Originally from Delhi, Amir was a slender boy with an angular face, bright eyes and a slick of black hair. “I wish you had protected me. That really hurt.”

The driver brought the Range Rover to a halt and glanced over her shoulder at them. Jody, a former SO14 royal protection officer, was one of their instructors at the Guardian Training Headquarters in Wales. Kitted out in a black-and-red tracksuit, her dark brown hair bunched in a ponytail, she looked more like a personal fitness trainer than a bodyguard. But that was the point. Few people ever suspected women to be part of a close-protection team, and that gave them an edge.

“Exercise over, Connor—your Principal’s definitely dead,” she said, arching a slim eyebrow in amusement at Amir’s paint-splattered face. Then her expression hardened. “If that had been a soft-nosed sniper bullet, Amir would be headless now.”

“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” remarked Charley, who sat in the front passenger seat. “He doesn’t use it much anyway,” she added in her sun-soaked Californian tones, shooting him a wink.

Amir’s mouth fell open in exaggerated offense. “Hey! You can be the Principal next time.”

Staring out of the passenger window, Charley sighed to herself. “If only . . .”

As Jody spun the Range Rover around, Connor caught sight of Charley’s reflection in the glass. Her sky-blue eyes had lost their sparkle, and her usual confidence appeared to have faltered for a moment.

“Nothing to keep you from being the shooter next time,” Connor suggested.

In the window, he saw Charley brush aside a loose strand of blond hair as her smile returned.

“That would be unfair,” she replied, her reflected eyes meeting his and narrowing in challenge. “You wouldn’t last ten seconds.”

Connor laughed. He didn’t doubt it. Despite the difficulties she faced, Charley was a girl of many talents: a former Quiksilver Junior Surfing Champion, she was also a skillful martial artist as well as fluent in Mandarin. For all Connor knew, she was probably an elite markswoman too.

Jody parked in front of the abandoned warehouse and ordered Connor and Amir out as the other members of Alpha team gathered for the training debrief. Marc, a lean boy with bleached-blond hair who’d been filming the training exercise for class assessment, patted Connor sympathetically on the back. “Quelle malchance! You were almost home free.”

Opening the door for Charley, Connor shrugged at his French friend. “Yep, almost.”

“Almost is no good for a bodyguard,” Ling pointed out, hefting a gun that looked huge against her tiny, sleek figure. Her oval face was framed by a bob of jet-black hair, and a silver piercing glinted on one side of her elfin nose.

“Yeah,” Richie agreed in his thick Irish accent. “It’s like almost jumping out of the way of a train. You still get hit.” He fired off a couple of paintballs at the abandoned Dumpster for effect.

“Cease fire!” scolded Jody as she took Charley’s wheelchair out of the back of the Range Rover. “Not everyone’s wearing safety goggles.”

“Sorry, miss,” Richie replied. He offered an apologetic grin, his braces catching the sunlight like a diamond-toothed rapper. “Just celebrating our victory.”

Charley slid nimbly into her chair and joined the rest of them. But Connor noticed there was still one person missing from the team.

“Bull’s-eye!” shouted Jason, suddenly dropping down from the fire escape of the building opposite. He strode over with his paintball gun slung across his shoulder like Rambo. He was muscular for his age, with a thickset jaw and tousled dark hair, and Connor wouldn’t have been surprised if his Aussie teammate had actually thought he was Rambo.

“I should change sides and become an assassin,” said Jason, high-fiving Richie and Ling.

“You kill me,” cooed Ling, her half-moon eyes twinkling mischievously as she dead-punched him on the arm in return. “Or at least . . . you could try.”

“You were on the roof?” challenged Connor. “I thought there were only two shooters in this exercise.”

Jason shrugged. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“But that’s unfair,” said Connor, turning to Jody for an explanation. “Everyone else had just two.”

“As a bodyguard, you can’t presume anything,” she replied. “Threats can come from all directions and there can be any number of them. That’s why you need to have eyes in the back of your head.”

She addressed the rest of Alpha team. “Under the stress of a combat situation, your body floods with adrenaline and stress hormones. Although this benefits your strength and ability to react, one of the negative effects is ‘tunnel vision.’ You lose your peripheral sight and focus only on the danger in front of you. As Connor’s just experienced, that can lead to fatal mistakes.”

Connor gave a dismayed sigh. He hadn’t looked up once during the exercise. This was his fourth failed test in a row. Given his poor performance, he was seriously beginning to question his abilities as a bodyguard.

“Don’t look so glum,” said Marc. “The Dumpster was a clever idea. I got it all on video. It was hilarious!”

“And effective,” Ling admitted grudgingly. “I wasted all my ammo trying to hit you.”

“But the Dumpster wouldn’t have protected them from real bullets,” Jason was quick to point out.

“An unseen target is harder to hit,” countered Charley. “It was a good distraction.”

Jody nodded in agreement. “That’s very true. Connor’s tactic would have increased their chances of survival. However”—she pointed to the paint-smeared Range Rover—“since he didn’t protect his Principal, it’s his job to clean the car.”