South China Sea
HANNAH SLADE WAS ASLEEP when the door to her cabin burst open. Three masked men ran in. They came straight to her bunk and, without a word, lifted her off it and carried her out through the bulkhead door. She let out a scream of protest but quickly felt a hand placed over her mouth. Her nostrils registered an overpowering smell of diesel oil.
Was she being rescued? Was this the moment she had longed for ever since she had been overpowered by those two men in the Kowloon café? ‘The Service never leaves an agent behind.’ That was what they had kept telling her in all those clandestine park-bench meetings in Kensington Gardens. But she wasn’t strictly an ‘agent’, was she? She was a collector. Maybe they secretly had different rules for people like her. All these thoughts had been playing on her mind as she lay there, trapped in that tiny prison of a cabin, while an unseen engine took her across the sea to an unknown destination.
She was being rushed down a corridor until they stopped by a bulkhead door and now someone was pulling a black hood over her head. This did not feel like a rescue. Hannah fought to control her rising panic. Then she remembered the gum. Her tongue curled upwards inside her mouth, flicking over the wad containing the chip she had repositioned earlier, behind her molars. It had been a close-run thing when it had fallen out: she had nearly swallowed it by accident, and she didn’t want to think what that would entail. So now it was back in place, but for how much longer? She clamped her teeth together as she felt the men shift their position and start moving again. She heard the scrape and rasp of a metal bulkhead door being pulled open and now she was being carried down steps. One of the men holding her briefly lost his footing and they nearly dropped her. She emitted a silent scream inside her hood. Another stop and what sounded like another bulkhead door. A change in air pressure and a new sound: waves. It was daylight and even with the hood loosely covering her face she was aware of the warm, damp ocean air. Oh God, she thought, they’re about to throw me overboard! She screamed once more and a voice shouted: ‘Quiet! Be still! You are safe.’
Safe? That was the last thing Hannah felt. She could feel hands grabbing her as she was lifted up again and deposited roughly on something soft and rubbery. There was the sound of an outboard engine revving up, then a sudden lurch, which tipped her sideways. She was on a Zodiac, an inflatable speedboat. That much she knew. But she had absolutely no idea where they were taking her. Dr Hannah Slade, respected climate scientist from Imperial College London, and part-time covert collector for the Secret Intelligence Service, felt utterly helpless.