Diddly-dee diddly-daa, diddly-dee diddly-daa …
The 23:55 non-stop XLR overnight train to Shanghai headed relentlessly north at never less than 165mph. As swift as it was luxurious, it was also the newest sleeper rail service in China. It had twenty coaches with each coach containing eight cabins. Beautifully designed and fitted to the highest specification, demand was high – even at RMB1900 (around £200) a berth – and foreign passengers had to book in advance to pass all security and transit checks. For their trouble, they could expect to arrive in downtown Shanghai for lunch the next day, completely refreshed.
Diddly-dee diddly-daa, diddly-dee diddly-daa …
Carla and Finn held their breath.
A rotund, uniformed attendant finished checking the bathroom at the end of the last carriage for stowaways and made his way to his own guard’s compartment. The cleaners must have left the door open again. He shook his head, then paused in the doorway to check his phone. He was expecting a message from his wife regarding his daughter’s exam results.
Nothing yet.
From her position on the luggage rack 20cm above his head, Carla was so close she could see his protruding eyebrows and generous belly. She tried desperately to control her breathing.
The attendant stepped inside. It was a simple office, with a messy desk, a CCTV screen and a digital graphic that displayed the status of each of the cabins in the five carriages he covered. Before he could sit down, a buzzer sounded. Cabin 6 in Car 3 lit up on the display. The attendant sighed, then opened a cupboard and hung a key with a yellow metallic fob on to one of many empty hooks. Then he left, locking the door behind him as he made his way back down the train to Car 3.
Carla gasped. Finn, hidden deep in the thicket of her black hair shouted: “Go!”
She leapt down from the rack.
“What did he put in the cupboard?” asked Finn.
She opened it and looked inside. There was only one key. It read ‘2:2’.
“Car 2, Cabin 2 … it must be empty!” said Finn. “Come on! Take the key. We can lock ourselves in before he gets back.”
An instinct of Carla’s protested. “We should pay.”
“What? How!”
“It’s dishonest!”
“You want to wait up there all night? Or get arrested? What are you waiting for? Go!” said Finn from her hair.
Taking a deep breath, Carla pocketed the key, unlatched the lock on the guard compartment door and they stepped out into the corridor. A divider door into Car 1 hissed open. The corridors were quiet and air conditioned, but they were also narrow. Passengers moved back and forth to the bathrooms and restaurant car, most of them excited tourists and family groups.
Just as they stepped into Car 2, the attendant appeared at the far end of the corridor, making his way back towards them, smiling at the passengers, answering questions.
“Oh my God …” said Carla.
“Make friends! Make friends with that family! Quick!”
“Hi!” said Carla to a pair of blond-haired children waiting to use the bathroom. “Do you guys speak English? Do you know if there’s a shower in there?”
“Sure,” said the older girl in a Swedish accent.
“We never had a shower on a train before!” explained a boy of eight or so, excited, holding up his phone, which had a Batman case. “I take pictures!”
His older sister rolled exasperated eyes at Carla, making teen-to-teen contact.
“We’re here with our parents. Did you like Hong Kong?” the teenage girl asked. The attendant was only a couple of metres away. Carla willed herself not to look at him and literally wrung her hands as she spoke.
“Hong Kong was great, but we had to run like crazy we were so late, so …”
“Are you on holiday?”
“I was playing in a concert!”
The attendant was now literally squeezing past them. Through the curls of Carla’s hair Finn looked directly into his eyes.
“The cello. I’m a soloist!”
“Cool,” said the teenage girl. The little boy took Carla’s picture with a flash of his camera.
“Are you famous?” asked the boy.
“Not really, I’m just—”
“Go!” said Finn, seeing the attendant disappear. “We’ve got to get in before he makes it back to his office!”
“Oh I think I hear my mom calling me!” Carla said, stepping towards the door of Cabin 2 and inserting the key with a little prayer. The key clicked home. She turned it and shot inside.
The attendant arrived back at his compartment.
All was well, no more cabin indicators were flashing, and the passengers were settling down for the night. Hold on … He paused for a second as he hung up his jacket. He could have sworn he locked the door before he left? He checked the room quickly … All the passports and papers were as he’d left them. Good. But still he could have sworn—
Beep.
His phone sounded. He checked the text. His daughter had passed!
He picked up a dragon head the size of a dice from the mess on his desk, a charm a cleaner had found that morning that must have fallen from a bracelet. He blew on it, blessed his luck, then texted back his congratulations.
Diddly-dee diddly-daa, diddly-dee diddly-daa …
It came in a package delivered by a uniformed courier, one of sixty the driver delivered during the all-night shift from the depot in FEDEX/#41/SHANG. It was unusual in that it was unexpected, after midnight, and addressed to ‘Dr A. Allenby, Long March Suite, Siam Towers’.
Bo Zhang was furious. Al was a top-secret personage whose whereabouts were meant to be a state secret.
For Al, for all of them, it was if a great balloon of tension that had been filling for the past thirty hours had been popped.
Suddenly things were moving very fast. Technicians gathered round the package, instruments sniffing for poisons or explosives. Al examined every minute detail, then opened it.
It contained a single item. A chess piece. A king. And it came with a note in elegant handwriting that read: “Check. Unless you’d prefer an exchange of queens?”
“Typically flamboyant,” remarked King as Al screwed it up, suddenly deflated.
“What does it mean?” asked Bo, alarmed at Allenby’s flagrant disregard for the rules of evidence.
“It means ‘do nothing,’” said King. “Sit this one out.”
“He knows we’re on to him,” said Al as he began pacing and thinking.
“And the ‘exchange of queens’?” asked Bo. Before King could answer –
“Sir!”
Three minutes later, Al and an undignified rabble of policemen, uniformed security chiefs, scientists and two flying nano-warriors in X2 Skimmers raced each other down the Nanjing Road to look at the large display window of Yolo Electronics.
They reached it, panting.
On a screen in the top right ran a gif of a woman in her sixties sat in a rocking chair, knitting. A thoughtful look upon her face.
Grandma.
Al leant against the glass and drank her in – the woman who had brought him into the world, had softened its sharp edges, had defined and ennobled his experience of it. Who loved him.
“You fool …” he said out loud.
Not to himself. Not to her. To Kaparis.
Meanwhile, back at the Roof of The World operational centre, the youngest Chinese technician seconded to the G&T team, Shi Jian, approached Major Stubbs with a new piece of evidence and in a state of mild terror.
Shi Jian had never addressed a 10mm-high person before.
“You asked, sir, for any unusual activity? Does this qualify?” he said to the tiny, owlish figure who looked up, sceptical.
With shaking hands Shi Jian held out a plastic evidence bag containing the charred remains of a nit comb.
“I doubt it. I doubt most things and it’s an attitude that’s served me well,” said Stubbs.
He indicated the bag should be placed on the table where he could examine it.
Shi Jian briefly explained. Apparently, a woman’s hair had caught fire in a factory bathroom. First responders had managed to beat out the flames and an investigation had begun. She had finished her shift and suspected she had lice. She had been pulling a nit comb through her hair when it combusted.
Stubbs stuck on his glasses and peered at the burnt teeth of the comb. Some of the ‘lice’ had become entombed in the melting plastic.
Stubbs had seen head lice before.
These were definitely not head lice.
“Oh dear,” Stubbs said, looking up at Shi Jian as if it was all his fault. “I suppose you better raise the alarm.”
As Al led the charge back up to the Roof of the World in one of the express elevators, he explained his excitement to Bo and King. “He’s overplayed his hand!”
At last he felt free. At last he felt vital. Let battle commence.
“He hasn’t got Finn. If he had Finn he’d show him to us,” said Al, convincing himself. “That woman would happily die a thousand times before she saw a member of her family – or anybody else’s – come to harm. We nix whatever this is, we find Finn, we hunt Kaparis down, and only then do we look for her … Any other way round she’d never forgive us.”
“For real,” said Delta, hovering beside him in a Skimmer.
The elevator doors opened to a space suddenly alive with activity.
“What’s going on, people?” Al demanded, and he was led to where Stubbs had begun to hold court at the large central banqueting table, Delta and Kelly flying up for a ringside seat.
In the hubbub, Bo Zhang was taken aside. “Sir, Hong Kong on the line …”
The news from Hong Kong brought Delta to a crashing halt.
“Your sister has gone missing.”
“What do you mean ‘missing’?” she finally grunted at Commander King, having to force the words past her own fear.
Al had never seen her like this. She was tiny on the table before them, but still somehow terrifying, eyes wide, teeth gritted, ready to run or kill. Probably kill.
“She disappeared from a hospital in Hong Kong where she was being examined following a ‘delusional episode’,” King explained.
Tears filled Delta’s eyes. Her baby sister? All her life she’d been determined Carla should be the safest, most normal girl in America, yet she seemed set on being as odd, inquisitive and unusual as possible. And now this?
“But it’s not that straightforward. She was frightened but rational,” continued King. “Her ‘delusion’ consisted of hearing voices …”
“Oh God …” said Delta.
“Of a ‘tiny person’. An English friend.”
“What?!” said Al.
“Apparently a friend of her sister’s who was in some kind of trouble. And who could fly,” King finished.
“Finn …” Delta could hardly believe it.
“That’s no delusion,” insisted Al. “He must have found her and freaked her out …”
“How? How could he possibly have got to Hong Kong?” said Delta.
Al just shook his head in wonder. “He’s some kid …”
Delta knew in her bones it was true and took the strangest comfort from the thought that two people she loved so much could have found each other.
“We can’t confirm anything at present,” reported Bo Zhang. “A lot of what’s coming through is chaotic. CCTV systems across Hong Kong have been targeted and wiped in a cyber-attack. But known Triad members were witnessed making their way into the hospital.”
“Either Kaparis has got them already, or they’re on the run,” deduced Commander King. “And if they’re on the run, I trust Bo Zhang to find her – to find them both.”
“We are doing the utmost,” Bo Zhang affirmed. “All Hong Kong is on alert. Your sister’s description is circulating nationwide.”
Delta looked up at all three of them. “Are you sure you’re doing everything? Absolutely everything? Is there anything, anything else we can possibly do?” she pleaded.
Cars put their lights on. Leaves fell. Kids ran to rugby practice.
Hudson waited.
Every other Monday evening during term time Hudson had to miss chess club in order to spend an excruciating hour in the presence of the grinning Hertfordshire Schools psychologist. It was excruciating because he had to remember everything he’d made up over the previous two yearsfn1.
That evening’s session was going to be much worse than usual because, for once, he actually had a genuine psychological hang-up – one he was forbidden by the Official Secrets Act to discuss.
“Why wasn’t I kidnapped?” he wanted to ask. He had been left reeling on the streets of Chelsea while Grandma and Finn had been whisked off in the most dramatic fashion.
“Am I so unimportant?” he wanted to ask. “Why did I get left out?”
His mother always insisted he was ‘special’, but what did she know. She’d never been put to one side during a major terrorist kidnapping.
The door to the meeting room opened and before the grinning psychologist could even say a jaunty “Hello mate!” Hudson demanded, “What if my entire life is a series of near misses?”
The psychologist, for once, looked thrown. His grin dissolved, but before he could say anything, one of the new heavyset ‘school caretakers’ appeared in the doorway (in fact one of the Special Branch Officers now detailed to protect Hudson 24/7) .
“Call,” said the cop and handed Hudson a mobile.
“Hello?” said Hudson, bemused.
“Hudson!”
“Dr Allenby?”
“Hudson, get Yo-yo from the house, then get on a fast jet to China. There’s one waiting at Hook Hall now. This is a Save the World situation.”
“Cool,” said Hudson.