CHAPTER FOUR

‘Kieron? Kieron?’

No answer. Bex fought against the temptation to slam her hands on the steering wheel of the hire car.

‘What’s the problem?’ Bradley asked.

Bex looked over at him. He still had dust and cobwebs on his jacket and his hair, from the underground tunnel, and the stress of their exit from the secret military base had left him pale. She thought she could detect a slight tremor in the hand that he had rested on his knee. He really wasn’t up to sustained agent work – he was an agent handler, more used to sipping latte and eating croissants while providing her with information and support. In the past few weeks he’d had to go well outside his comfort zone.

‘The ARCC link has gone down,’ she said, switching her attention back to the road. She glanced at the rear-view mirror, looking for any sign that they were being followed. The number plates on the cars were all different to a few minutes ago: she had deliberately varied her speed and changed lanes a couple of times so that anyone trying to stay behind them would have had to match her movements, making themselves obvious. Most drivers picked a speed and a lane and stayed with it. Spotting someone who wasn’t behaving like everyone else – that was one of the main tricks of undercover work.

‘That shouldn’t happen,’ Bradley said, sounding concerned. ‘I checked the power on both sets of glasses earlier, and they were fully charged. They couldn’t have lost power that quickly. And it’s not like a mobile phone, where you can lose coverage if you get out of range of a transmitter. We designed the ARCC kit to piggyback off military satellites, and there are always at least five of them visible in the sky anywhere in the world.’

‘Solar flares?’

‘No. Those satellites are hardened against high levels of radiation.’ He frowned. ‘I suppose it’s theoretically possible that we’re being jammed, but the frequency the kit works on shifts around randomly to avoid that very problem.’

‘I hate to mention it, but could Avalon Richardson have done something? Uploaded a virus, maybe, or hacked the code?’

‘Nah. I hate to blow my own trumpet, but the code is encrypted and unhackable. She couldn’t get into it.’ He paused for a moment, obviously thinking. ‘Maybe Kieron’s just dropped the glasses into his fizzy drink.’

‘Maybe he’s dropped them on the floor and accidentally stepped on them.’ Bex frowned. ‘If he’s broken them, he’s going to be in so much trouble.’

‘The frames are built from a Kevlar-titanium composite,’ Bradley said reassuringly, ‘and the lenses are made out of a transparent metallic compound called strontium vanadate rather than glass. To break the ARCC kit, you’d have to be really deliberate about it.’

‘Fair enough.’ Bex relaxed, but only slightly. There was still the worry about why the kit had stopped working. ‘Broken wire inside? Dry solder joint?’

‘Military-spec materials and construction.’ She felt, rather than saw, Bradley shake his head. ‘You could put the glasses in the washing machine and leave it running for an hour and they’d still work when they came out.’

‘And they’d be freshly scented with lavender,’ Bex pointed out. ‘Don’t think I didn’t notice you’ve changed the fabric conditioner we use.’

‘I bet James Bond never has to wash his own clothes,’ Bradley muttered.

Out of habit, Bex checked her mirror again, then indicated right and, a few seconds later, accelerated across to the outside lane of the motorway. She checked her mirror again to see if anyone behind her sped up in response, but nobody did. It looked like they’d got away safely.

Assuming Avalon Richardson’s team didn’t put an electronic tracker underneath the car while it was parked, a small, uncomfortable voice inside her head piped up.

‘We should check the car for bugs,’ she said.

‘Interesting segue there, from fabric conditioner to bugs,’ Bradley said. ‘I do wonder about the way your mind works sometimes.’ Before Bex could respond, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a small black box the same size and shape as a mobile phone. ‘This thing can check for any transmitters or active electronics. Next set of services we get to, I suggest you pull in and I’ll check beneath the car while you get two large salted caramel lattes to go. I didn’t really have time to check when we left the car park. Things were a bit rushed, and I didn’t want to hold us up.’

‘Good thinking. Yes, I could do with a coffee. And a toilet break.’ Even as she was speaking, her mind was considering the malfunctioning ARCC equipment. ‘I’ve never known the kit to just go down like this,’ she said. ‘It’s disturbing. I mean, I know we can switch it off when we want to, but I get used to just having it there, always in the background.’

‘You haven’t actually switched it off by accident, have you?’ Bradley asked. ‘I mean, while you were scratching your head or something?’

Bex took a hand off the steering wheel and pulled the glasses off her head, then passed them across to Bradley. ‘Do you want to check?’

Taking them, he said, ‘Good idea. I’ll run a system diagnostic as well.’ He went quiet for a moment as he examined the glasses, turning them over in his hands and running his finger along the arms. ‘OK, it’s switched on. That eliminates one possible cause of the problem.’ He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small leather case. Bex had seen it before – it contained the tools he needed to carry out any maintenance on either of the two pairs of ARCC glasses. Opening it, he selected something like a small screwdriver, with a shaft no thicker than a piece of wire, and carefully manoeuvred it into an almost invisible hole that Bex had noticed some time ago, located right in the middle of the bridge that joined the lenses together, on the inside surface where nobody could see it. The only reason Bex had spotted it before was that a bit of fluff had got caught there.

‘Right, I’ve set a system check running.’ Bradley put the glasses on. Bex couldn’t help noticing that he hesitated just fractionally before he did so. Clearly there was still some kind of psychological issue there. He couldn’t even wear them without getting nervous, let alone use them. ‘Because these glasses can’t project information onto the lenses the way Kieron’s ones do –’

Kieron’s glasses? she thought with a twinge. If Bradley was thinking of the glasses that were meant to be his as Kieron’s then it sounded like he’d mentally given up. And where did that leave their team?

‘– the chip inside can give a verbal readout of the top-level status of the system. Give me a minute while it tells me what’s going on.’

A sign ahead of them indicated that the nearest services were one mile ahead. Bex checked her mirror again, then indicated and changed lanes, first to the middle lane and then again to the inside lane.

’Well,’ Bradley said after a few moments, ‘the chip is talking to me, which means that firstly the chip itself is working, and secondly the miniature loudspeakers in the arms are working as well.’ He paused for a moment. ‘OK, all of the top-level diagnostics are coming over as being fine. Obviously the diagnostic can’t go into a huge amount of detail verbally, but it’s not reporting any error codes. It’s just not getting any signal from Kieron’s glasses. I think the fault actually is at his end.’

‘Is it possible that he can hear us and see what our glasses are seeing but we just can’t hear him?’ Bex asked.

‘I don’t see how that could happen,’ Bradley said, sounding cautious, ‘but there’s an easy way to find out.’ He paused, then said in a louder voice, ‘Kieron, if you can hear this then please call my mobile. I know you’ve got the number.’

The half-mile warning for the services flashed past. Bex got ready to take the slip road off the motorway, while waiting to hear the Bradley’s ringtone. Nothing happened.

‘Just my luck if it rang right now,’ he said, ‘and it turned out to be my mum. But no, either Kieron’s unable to call for some reason, or he can’t hear us just like we can’t hear him.’

‘We’ll call him when we’ve stopped,’ Bex said, steering the car left off the motorway and slowing down as they approached the car park and the large, hangar-like structure that contained the services. The car park was about half full, and she drove past several empty spaces before she found one she liked – with an additional empty space on either side, minimising the places where people could hide, and a third space in front which meant she could pull away quickly if there was any trouble, rather than having to reverse out. She wasn’t anticipating any problems, not here and not now, but it was the way her mind worked. Always make sure you have a clear exit and plenty of space.

She parked and switched the engine off. Bradley unclipped his seat belt and opened the door. He took the ARCC glasses off and slipped them into his shirt pocket before climbing out of the car. He held his little scanner device up so that Bex could see it. ‘I’ll check around the car. You call Kieron.’

‘I’m not going to set that thing off if I call?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘It automatically detects mobile phone protocols and ignores them.’ He looked around. ‘It’s a good filter to have: I imagine most of the people here are on their phones a lot of the time.’

As Bradley crouched down and began to move around the side of the car, presumably holding his scanner underneath it where someone might have attached a bug magnetically to the car’s body, Bex pulled her mobile from her jacket pocket. It was the generic pay-as-you-go one she’d bought in Venice a few weeks before – known in the spy trade as a ‘burner’. That was another rule of secret-agent work: never use your own phone, or a phone that could give away anything about your real identity. The number for Kieron’s own pay-as-you-go mobile, bought at the same time, was programmed in there, but under the name ‘Ryan Drewe’. His friend Sam was in there as ‘Craig Drewe’ and Bradley was listed as ‘Tom Drewe’, along with a bunch of other made-up people. It would give the impression that she had a wide circle of friends and family if anyone ever took the phone off her and looked through its data.

She called ‘Ryan Drewe’, hoping that Kieron still had his own phone on him. She’d told him and Sam to keep their burners on them at all times, charged up and switched on, but she knew what kind of memory teenagers had. Or, rather, she was learning every day. In the event that Kieron didn’t answer then she would call his real mobile, but then she’d have to throw her own burner away, because she would have corrupted it with real-world information that someone could use to trace Kieron.

Bradley suddenly stood up in front of the car’s bonnet as the phone started to ring. He held his scanner up. ‘Nothing,’ he said, his voice muffled by the car windows. ‘We’re clean.’

‘Go and grab two coffees, and a couple of Danish pastries,’ Bex called. Bradley waved his agreement, and headed off to the main building.

‘Hello?’ It was Kieron’s voice speaking in her ear, but not with the clarity of the ARCC kit. This was a crackly, muffled, compressed phone line. He sounded wary.

‘Kieron? It’s Bex.’

‘Can we use real names?’ he asked. ‘I wasn’t sure what the rules were.’

‘As long as there’s no data left electronically on the phone, it’s OK. Just, if you ever leave a message, call me Chloe.’

‘OK.’ He paused, then said, ‘What happened to the ARCC kit? The communications went down at my end. I wasn’t sure if you could hear me or not, but I couldn’t see or hear you. I was worried that … that something might have happened.’

‘No, we lost communications as well. What about pulling in data? Can you still do that? Can you access the Internet, and classified databases?’

‘No. The glasses are – well, just glasses. They can’t do anything.’

‘OK, don’t worry. Bradley and I are working on it. We’re heading back now, so we’ll see you in a few hours.’

‘There’s an error message,’ he said.

‘Tell me what it says, and I’ll relay it to Bradley.’

A moment’s pause, then Kieron said, ‘There’s words on the bottom of the virtual screen that’s projected in the middle of my field of vision. They say: “Connection lost. Unable to establish link to secondary ARCC. Please check link.”’

Bex thought about the error message. It confirmed what she and Bradley had pretty much already decided: the problem wasn’t with the glasses, it was with the communication link between them.

‘Bex?’ Kieron’s voice again.

‘Yeah? Sorry, I was thinking.’

‘Is this serious?’

She hesitated before answering. She didn’t want to worry Kieron, but she’d promised herself a while back that she would never lie to him. ‘It might be,’ she said eventually. ‘We need to know more about what’s causing the problem.’

‘It’s just that –’ Kieron’s voice broke off momentarily, and when it came back he sounded excited. ‘The message has vanished! It looks like the glasses are rebooting! Give me a second … Yeah, there’s a different message telling me that the link’s been re-established!’

‘OK.’ Bex felt a knot inside her chest start to loosen. ‘Let’s not start celebrating too early. Don’t use them until I say you can. I’ll let Bradley know what’s happened.’ She considered for a moment. ‘It’s looking more and more like there’s a problem with sending information between our glasses. The glasses themselves may not be the problem. If you need to talk to us, call on your burner until we get this sorted.’

‘Will do. Look, I’ve never asked, but how exactly does the ARCC kit transfer information around? I mean, I know it’s done via satellite, but not normal communications satellites, surely? That might get intercepted.’

‘No, you’re right, that wouldn’t be secure at all. Bradley and I designed it so the information is passed through a dedicated British military navigation satellite system code-named PEREGRINE. There are seventy-six satellites in an orbital constellation, just like the American GPS system and the Russian GLONASS.’

‘So how did you manage to get access to a British military satellite system?’ Kieron sounded impressed.

Bex smiled, remembering. ‘Bradley and I went to work for the company that made the satellites, when we left university. We realised that if we could put a small extra package on each satellite then we could reroute coded messages back and forth anywhere in the world, and nobody would realise anything was happening. The signal is spread-spectrum, so it can’t be traced easily, and most of the processing is done within the glasses themselves, with links out through the Internet cloud to various databases. Bradley wrote the software and I designed the hardware, then we briefed MI6 on what the kit could do. They liked the idea, and paid the company to put a little black box and an extra antenna on each satellite. We built ten sets of linked ARCC glasses, and we lease them to MI6. Everyone is happy, and Great Britain is safer as a result. Everyone wins. Well, except the bad guys.’

‘So there are other agents like you? You’ve kinda referred to them before, but you’ve never actually confirmed it.’

Bex nodded, even though Kieron couldn’t see the gesture. ‘Nine other teams. We don’t know who they are and they don’t know who we are. Each team is freelance, recruited by MI6, each team reports directly to MI6, and each team uses two pairs of ARCC glasses – one like yours and one like mine. One agent handler working somewhere safe; one agent out in the field, probably not safe.’

‘But you and Bradley invented it.’

‘Me and Bradley invented it,’ she confirmed, ‘but inventing it wasn’t enough. We had to use it. That’s the fun part.’

‘And you weren’t worried about MI6 just grabbing one of the other sets of glasses and taking them apart to see how they worked, so they could make more? That’s the sort of thing they do, isn’t it?’

Bex laughed. ‘No, there’s hardware and software booby traps in the ARCC kit – lots of them – and MI6 know that. Try and take the glasses apart and they’ll fry the chip and wipe all the memory completely. It’s unhackable and unexploitable.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Kieron said, and he sounded like he meant it. ‘But if the problem isn’t with the glasses but the satellites – the top-secret military satellites – then doesn’t that mean there’s a bigger problem?’

‘It does.’

‘And aren’t those other nine teams at risk?’

‘They are,’ she said grimly. ‘All across the world, there are nine other freelance undercover secret agents who suddenly lost all their support, and nine other handlers who couldn’t talk to their agents. That’s not a good thing to happen. It looks like everything’s working again now, but we can’t be sure there won’t be another outage. We have to find out what’s gone wrong.’

‘Shouldn’t you, like, tell them that something’s gone wrong?’

Bex sighed. ‘In an ideal world, yes, but we don’t know who they are. We don’t know who MI6 issued the ARCC glasses to. Only the MI6 bosses know that, and frankly, Bradley and I don’t know who to trust there.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Also, if we admit that there’s a problem with the ARCC kit, then MI6 might just walk away, and that would leave Bradley and me without a job. We really need to sort this problem out ourselves, if we can.’

‘Bex, I don’t –’

‘Look,’ she interrupted, not wanting to prolong the argument, ‘we need to set off again. I’ll call you when we’re about an hour away from Newcastle, OK?’

‘OK.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘Be careful.’

‘You too, kid.’

As Bex stowed her phone away, she realised that Bradley was approaching her with coffees and a brown paper bag that presumably had their Danish pastries in.

‘You’re looking relieved,’ he said, ‘but you’re also looking grim. What’s going on?’

Standing outside their hire car with their coffees on the still-warm bonnet, Bex quickly briefed Bradley on what Kieron had told her.

‘OK,’ he said, holding his pastry up and examining it closely, ‘things could be worse. I mean, they could be better, but they could be worse. At best this was a one-time thing, it’ll never happen again and we can move on with our lives. At worst, it’ll come back for longer and longer periods of time until the SIS-TERR capability is unusable, in which case we stop getting paid.’

‘And other agents like me are at risk,’ Bex pointed out.

‘Yes, that as well.’ He licked the icing on the Danish experimentally. ‘Mmm, cinnamon. Lovely.’ He took a bite.

‘So what do we do about it?’ Bex grabbed her coffee and took a swig.

Bradley frowned. He was silent for a long time, then he said, ‘Look, Bex, I’ll be honest with you. Given that I’ve obviously still got some kind of psychological block about using the kit, and given that neither of us wants to put Kieron’s life at risk any more than we already have, I’m very tempted to just leave the kit, walk away and invent something else that we can make money from.’ He held a hand up as she started to interrupt. ‘No, let me finish. That’s what I want to do, but I know the way your mind works. You love the undercover work of course – we both know that – but you also feel responsible for those other nine teams. You don’t want them to be left hanging. You also don’t want to let MI6 down, although heaven knows someone inside MI6 is quite happy to let us down, and hard. So, we have to sort out this mess.’ He took a quick gulp from his own coffee. Knowing he wasn’t yet finished, Bex waited. She knew that Bradley’s mind worked like any computer programmer’s: he broke problems down into simple steps and solved each step one at a time, with occasional diversions off sideways if he suddenly had some wildly creative idea. She had to be patient. ‘So we go back to Newcastle,’ he went on, ‘and I put the two sets of glasses together and connect them to my laptop to see if I can diagnose any underlying problems. If I don’t, well …’ He took a bite of his Danish and chewed it for a few moments before swallowing. ‘… in that case we’re going to have to break into the control centre for the top-secret PEREGRINE satellite system and work out what’s going wrong there.’

‘But we don’t know where the PEREGRINE satellites are controlled from,’ Bex pointed out calmly.

‘Correct. But MI6 do, so first we’re going to have to break into MI6 and find out where in the world the control station is located.’

Bex nodded. ‘Simple. Shall we do all that this afternoon, or can we get home and grab some dinner first?’

Bradley smiled. ‘I didn’t say it was going to be easy. I just said that’s what we’re going to have to do.’

‘And you’re sure you’re up to it?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m going to have to be, aren’t I?’

They finished their coffees and pastries in silence and got back in the car.

As they pulled away from the services and re-joined the motorway, Bex became preoccupied with trying to work out how to get inside MI6 and access their computers. This wasn’t like sneaking into a tech company or a university, both of which she’d done before. This was a whole order of magnitude harder.

Her mind turned to a quote she’d read somewhere. Maybe it was the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu, or maybe it was the much more recent Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. It might even have been Michael Jackson for all she knew; Bex had a bad memory for quotes and names. It was something about choosing the ground on which you were going to fight, rather than letting the enemy choose it.

OK, MI6 had huge amounts of security to stop anyone from breaking into their headquarters and their outstations. The trick, then, would be not to break into them, but break into somewhere else. Somewhere easier.

That didn’t actually make any sense.

But there was a germ of an idea there. A seed. She just needed to leave it alone and give it time to grow. The subconscious mind was great at problem-solving, but you couldn’t hurry it and it didn’t like to be stared at while it was thinking. She wasn’t like Bradley: she tended to come to conclusions without knowing at the time how she’d got there. It was only afterwards that she could work out the steps her subconscious had taken – sometimes very quickly, sometimes not.

Automatically she checked her mirrors again, sped up and changed lanes.

‘Everything OK?’ Bradley asked. ‘You’ve been very quiet.’

‘I’ve been thinking.’

Behind her, a black BMW sped up and changed lanes to match her.

Bradley noticed the sudden tension in her posture. ‘Problem?’

‘Not sure.’ She overtook the car that had been in front of her, then moved back into the central lane and slowed down slightly, making sure she left enough space between her and the car that she thought might be following her for it to slot into – but no more than that.

Most cars, if they’d pulled out to a faster lane, would overtake all the cars in front of them and only then decelerate and move back into a slower lane, confident they were in the lead. It was a subconscious thing. Most drivers hated to be stuck looking at someone else’s boot. The fact that this black BMW was staying very carefully behind her, but not letting her get too far ahead, suggested very strongly that it was following her.

She indicated left, then slid into the inner lane running alongside the hard shoulder of the motorway.

The black BMW slid in behind her and slowed down to match.

Bex half smiled to herself, remembering a time in New Mexico just a few months ago when she’d been in a similar situation. Today she wasn’t feeling so forgiving.

A sign flashed past indicating a slip road a mile ahead. She maintained a safe speed in the inner lane. The driver behind her, if they were indeed following her, wouldn’t know whether she was going to stay on the motorway or come off on the slip road. She could exploit that uncertainty.

The half-mile marker sign came and went. Bex took a deep breath. She wasn’t sure how the other driver would react to her next manoeuvre, but she was ready.

As her car passed the III, II, I markers counting down to the slip road, she flicked her indicator on as if she was going to take the exit.

The black BMW kept driving straight, not indicating. Maybe she was wrong.

She turned the steering wheel a little bit so that her car veered slightly towards the exit.

The car behind her veered as well. The driver still wasn’t signalling – some drivers didn’t – but they were definitely coming off the motorway.

Bex slammed her indicator upwards, indicating right instead of left, and turned the wheel hard so that her car veered back onto the motorway just in time.

She’d hoped that the driver behind her would keep going up the slip road, but they veered back onto the road too.

‘We’re being followed,’ she said grimly to Bradley.

‘Avalon Richardson’s people, or someone else?’

‘Difficult to tell from where I’m sitting, but they know that we know now. The cat’s out of the bag.’

The black BMW suddenly swung out into the central lane and sped up, causing a white van behind them to brake suddenly and beep its horn.

‘They’re trying to overtake us,’ Bex snarled.

‘Well, don’t let them,’ Bradley replied.

‘Good thinking, genius. Why don’t you just sit there and lick the crumbs of Danish out of your beard while I handle the driving?’ She swung the wheel abruptly, bringing them out in front of the BMW; bumpers almost touching.

Instead of slowing down, the BMW accelerated again, out into the outside lane. Before Bex could do the same it sped up even faster, coming alongside them.

‘I think they’re going to try a hard stop!’

‘Is that as bad as it sounds?’ Bradley said, sounding panicked.

‘Well, they can’t follow us to where we’re going, so they’re going to take us prisoner.’

‘Or kill us!’ Bradley half screamed.

Bex glanced sideways. The windows of the BMW were made of darkened glass. All she could see of the driver was an indistinct shape, but just as she was about to turn her head away the rear passenger-side window slid down and something poked out of the gap. For a moment she thought it was a gun, but it was too bulky, too much like something from a science-fiction movie.

‘What the –?’ she cried.

Bradley glanced past her as the BMW accelerated. The person in the back, hidden behind the blocky device, was aiming it apparently at the bonnet of their car. The front of the device, like a gun barrel but as wide as those extra-large coffee cups Kieron got from his barista girlfriend, gaped like the mouth of some bizarre animal.

‘They’re going to shoot the tyre out!’

‘No,’ Bradley corrected, ‘they’re going to stop the engine. That thing shoots a pulse of electromagnetic energy. It’s meant to scramble the engine management system on the car. All our power will cut out and we’ll slow to a halt.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. I’ve seen the specifications online.’

‘That’s when they’ll take us.’ She saw the person in the back settle the weapon against their shoulder, preparing to fire. Or whatever you called it.

Bex slammed her foot on the brake.

Her car skidded, the tyres squealing against the asphalt of the motorway. The BMW shot ahead as its driver failed to anticipate her manoeuvre. The gunman in the back activated the weapon, but the BMW was too far in front for them to hit Bex’s engine. She thought she saw a flash of blue light just as the white van whose driver had beeped the BMW earlier accelerated past her car on the inside, the other side to the BMW. Maybe the driver had gotten annoyed that they were blocking the central and outside lanes; maybe they were worried about the game the two cars were playing. Whatever the reason, the white van pulled ahead of Bex’s car just as the weapon fired.

The van suddenly slewed sideways. Bex glanced at the driver, who was staring at her dashboard with a panicked expression. She swerved towards the hard shoulder, slowing down fast, and as Bex passed her by she saw in her rear-view mirror that none of the BMW’s lights appeared to be working.

‘I don’t think they’ll be able to try that again for a while,’ Bradley said. ‘The power drain on that thing is incredible. Unless they’ve got a spare battery pack for it they’ll have to recharge it from the engine, and that’ll take some driving.’

‘Fair enough,’ Bex cautioned, ‘but I’m worried they’re going to try something else.’

At first the BMW had been hanging back, the team inside presumably waiting to see what happened to their engine, but they had obviously decided that they needed to try again. The car accelerated hard to pass Bradley and Bex. She tried to steer sideways, blocking them off, but she was too late. The car sped past them, then cut hard into the lane in front of them.

A weapon appeared from the same window as before. This weapon was different though – the barrel was longer, like a rifle, but flared like a fire extinguisher. Bex caught a glimpse of whoever was holding it, just black hair and part of an ear.

‘Any guesses?’ she asked, checking her mirrors to see if she had space to swerve left or right. There was just about enough space, although there was a car coming up behind her fast, and she was worried that it might suddenly decide to overtake. That ruled out swerving right.

‘Only that it’ll be non-lethal again. They want to stop us, not kill us.’

‘The problem is –’ Bex started to say, but the strange barrel of the new weapon suddenly jerked, and a stream of grey liquid shot out. Bex slammed the steering wheel to the left, moving their car rapidly out of the way of the liquid, whatever it was. Acid? Sticky, fast-hardening goo, like the stuff that had been used against Kieron in Albuquerque a few months ago? Whatever it was, she didn’t think she’d like it all over her car.

As they slid into the inside lane, the car behind, a yellow Lamborghini, accelerated to take their place. The grey liquid splattered against the windscreen of the Lamborghini. It hardened instantly into a thick, fuzzy, grey shield. The driver of the sports car switched their windscreen wipers on, but all they did was spread the stuff further across the glass without actually clearing a space. The Lamborghini slowed down, its driver obviously panicking about being unable to see. Bex pushed her foot down hard on the accelerator, speeding up past the BMW. As she checked to see what the BMW was going to do next she noticed in her rear-view mirror that the Lamborghini was slowing even more, and moving onto the hard shoulder. Smart move.

‘Flocculent,’ Bradley said.

‘Is that your word of the week?’ She glanced sideways as she zoomed past the BMW, but the passenger-side rear window had been raised again and she couldn’t see inside.

‘It means “resembling tufts of wool”.’

‘I’ll remember that in case it ever turns up in a crossword.’ She swerved suddenly right so that she was in the middle lane of the motorway again, and directly in front of the BMW. ‘I’m sick of this,’ she added. ‘Time to fight back.’

‘All for that. Flocculent, yeah, the stuff that second weapon fired was flocculent. The moment it hit that Lamborghini’s windscreen it dried and turned into a kind of woolly paste. It’s designed to blind drivers so they have to stop.’

‘Well, that’s two car-stopping weapons they’ve tried so far. I wonder what else they got for Christmas.’ She jerked the steering wheel left again, taking them suddenly into the inside lane, still ahead of the BMW. Before their pursuers could react she slammed her brakes on. She and Bradley slammed into their seat belts as their car abruptly skidded, tyres squealing. The BMW, taken by surprise, passed by on their right. She could see the driver’s head: just a dark shape through the smoked glass. She thought they turned to look at her as they went by.

As the BMW overtook them, Bex nudged the steering wheel right. Their car drifted towards the BMW’s back wing.

‘You’re going to crash into them!’ Bradley shouted.

‘Just a little bit,’ she muttered.

The front bumper of the hire car just touched the rear bumper of the BMW. Bex turned the steering wheel hard right, pushing against the BMW, then hard left, steering rapidly away from it. The BMW began to wobble as the driver tried to regain control, but whichever way they turned the steering wheel, it just seemed to make things worse. The BMW was shaking and juddering as the driver completely lost it. They must have floored the brake pedal, because suddenly the BMW was behind Bex and Bradley, disappearing in a cloud of smoke from its tyres. Other cars, their drivers already spooked by the on-going battle, swerved around it.

‘That,’ Bradley said, sounding like he’d been winded by the seat belt, ‘was a neat manoeuvre. Please don’t do it again.’

‘Did I ever mention that MI6 sent me on a defensive driving course?’ Bex asked, still watching the chaos behind them in her rear-view mirror.

‘That was not, by any definition, “defensive”,’ Bradley observed.