CHAPTER TEN

From Mount Pleasant Airport on the Falkland Islands, Bex flew to Chile’s Punta Arenas, sleeping from the moment they took off to the moment they set down. She’d been expecting a small aircraft, maybe with a propeller – something that would skim low over mountains and close to the sea, frightening the passengers, but actually the flight was on an Airbus A321 jet, and very comfortable.

Punta Arenas was a surprisingly modern airport, and she managed to get some South American street food from a stall in the transit lounge. She ate it while sitting beside a massive sculpture of an ice crystal that looked like a prop from one of those science-fiction series that Bradley loved to binge-watch. Through the large glass windows she could see ice-capped mountains. It looked cold out there – not surprising, considering the airport was at the furthest tip of South America and this was the closest she’d ever been to the South Pole. She let the landscape and the familiar-yet-strange airport lounge soothe her as she tried not to wonder what exactly she thought she was was doing.

With a change of aircraft, but not aircraft type, she flew north to Santiago Airport. The journey took her right up the thin ribbon of land running between the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Andes mountains on the other. That was Chile: 4,300 miles long but only 360 miles wide at most. Again, she slept most of the way. Her adventures rescuing the satellite technicians from the Japanese terrorists had exhausted her – especially all that running in the exo-boots across the uneven Falklands terrain.

And all for nothing. That’s what her brain kept telling her, whenever she was awake. The PEREGRINE satellite network was still compromised, although she hoped that the technicians could recover it. The problem was that she’d heard the Japanese terrorists talk about having password-protected what they’d done. All control of the satellites had passed to their facility in Japan, and all the travelling, stress and pain she and Kieron underwent had been for nothing.

Well, maybe not for nothing. If it hadn’t been for her and Kieron, then the technicians would be dead, killed by the bomb, and nobody would know who had control of the satellites. At least Bex knew that her next target was in Japan.

But she needed to sleep first, to get back her strength.

She managed to wake up enough at Santiago to transfer onto a Boeing 747 heading for Sydney, Australia. She ate dinner on the aircraft and slept again. At least, she thought it was dinner, although it might have been lunch; her body clock appeared to have stopped completely. Hell, she decided – and not for the first time – was to be perpetually travelling but never arriving.

At Sydney she had a spare two hours. She ate, even though she wasn’t hungry, and managed to snatch a few minutes talking to Bradley, Kieron and Sam on her mobile, which reassured her. At least Kieron had got home, and the technicians at the Falkland Islands control station appeared to be fighting back against the bad guys. But if the bad guys made it to Tokyo with the encoder and connected it into their system, then all bets were off.

After cutting the connection with Bradley, she looked up and across the sea of people in the terminal. Her brain went blank. Where was she? Obviously it was an airport, but she had suddenly lost track of exactly where in the world she was. She tried to get a clue from the faces, the accents and the languages around her, but there were ten different skin colours or shades within fifty metres of her, and probably ten times that many languages being spoken. The departures boards were in English; that was a clue. She tried to remember where she had come from, where she had started her journey, but everything was blank. A rising panic made her chest feel like straps had been secured around it. The tannoy language! The announcements were being made in English as well, and the voice had an accent. An Australian accent!

Australia! Sydney! It all came back to her in a rush. She’d flown from the Falklands to Chile, then an internal flight within Chile, then to Sydney, and she was flying on to Tokyo! The momentary lapse of memory left her shaken; even though she had slept on the various flights it hadn’t been proper sleep, more of a light doze interrupted by announcements over the aircraft’s PA system and cabin crew offering her juice or sandwiches. She needed eight hours in a proper bed. Her reflexes and her mental resilience were shot to hell at the moment.

The flight to Tokyo was boarding. Bex quickly stopped at one of the airport pharmacies and bought some earplugs, an eye-mask and a blister-pack of herbal sleeping tablets – herbal because she didn’t particularly like putting pharmaceutical drugs in her system, and an ordinary sleeping tablet would probably leave her feeling groggy.

With the earplugs and eye-mask blocking out the sensory input from the aircraft, and the valerian and hops in the herbal tablets relaxing her, she managed to get a fair amount of decent sleep while the aircraft was in the air. She had set her watch to Tokyo time before take-off, so that every time she glanced at it she would orient herself further. With all of those factors working in her favour, when the aircraft touched down in Tokyo she felt surprisingly good.

As Bradley had promised, a driver was waiting for her in arrivals, once she had got past immigration control and luggage retrieval. He wore a black suit, and held a sign saying Chloe Drewe. She discreetly looked around while she walked towards him to make sure there wasn’t anyone else looking for a Chloe Drewe. It wasn’t like she thought that the bad guys somehow knew she was coming and knew her cover name, but it was a sensible thing to check, just like never taking the first taxi you saw. She nodded to him and smiled. He bowed, and she bowed back. She was definitely in Japan.

Bradley had secured her a room in a hotel in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. That was where the leader of the bad guys had said they were heading to, when he had been giving orders to his team back in the Falkland Islands control station. But although Shinjuku was small, it was densely packed; her research had informed her that although it was only eighteen square kilometres, it had a population of over one-third of a million people. Given that Shinjuku Station was apparently the largest and busiest station in the world, she was glad that she wasn’t using public transport to get there.

Bex gazed out at the passing scenery, trying to get some feeling for where she was. The city itself reminded her of New York or Central London – towering office blocks and skyscrapers built in various impractical shapes – but behind them she could see white-capped mountains towering higher than the buildings. They were strangely similar to the ones she’d seen at the airport in Chile. Only the signs were different; every road sign, advertisement and shop front here was written in characters she couldn’t understand.

A few years back Bex had thought about learning Japanese, to complement the other languages she had mastered over the years, but she had quickly found that there were three separate writing systems in Japan: kanji, in which a single character stood for an entire word; hiragana, in which a single character stood for a syllable and words would be built up from several characters; and katakana, which was a syllabic system like hiragana but used only for English words like ‘computer’ or ‘soda’. As she sat there in the car, while it wended its way haltingly through the thick Tokyo traffic, she remembered trying to master kanji and discovering with horror that there were over fifty thousand of them to memorise. That had put her completely off learning the language. Now, as she looked out at the sea of information that surrounded the car, she regretted that she hadn’t persevered. Advertisements in particular dominated the landscape; running vertically up the buildings to which they were attached rather than horizontally, as they would have been in New York or London. It was early evening, and the light was beginning to fail as the sun set below the tops of the buildings. The steep, geometrical canyons formed by the office blocks shadowed quickly, but the adverts had already lit up, forming a shining backdrop in every colour Bex could imagine. She had spent quite a lot of time half watching science-fiction films with Bradley, and it was only now that she understood how many of the futuristic cityscapes of those films had been based on Tokyo, and the Shinjuku region in particular.

The car dropped her off in front of a hotel located in a skyscraper, with just the lobby, a bar and a restaurant on the ground floor. It was part of an American chain, which meant that although the lobby and the bar had touches of Japanese art and style, the staff all spoke perfect English. With the ARCC kit malfunctioning, and unable to translate for her, that was suddenly very important.

She checked in quickly, and went to her room. It was on the twenty-second floor, and had an incredible view over ninety per cent of the other buildings in the Shinjuku area, out to the waters of Tokyo bay, glittering red now in the low radiance of the setting sun, and to the lights of the city of Chiba on the other side. Having said that, it was small, but real estate was at a premium in Tokyo.

She checked the ARCC glasses, but although the system was in one of its ‘up’ phases she couldn’t get hold of Kieron. His end of the system was dead. That was odd, and rather unsettling; he knew what time she was getting to Tokyo – or, at least, Bradley did – and normally he would have been there for her, providing support. Right now there was nothing.

She checked her messages on the ‘Chloe Drewe’ phone, and found something from Bradley, sent some five hours ago.

Hope your flight was good. In case the ARCC kit is down, here’s some information for you. I’ve traced sales of satellite dishes, tracking equipment and high-end comms stuff in Japan. I’m assuming that the bad guys – whoever they are – will have had to set up their own control centre, and that’s not something you can do by buying online from a normal retailer. The only people who’ve bought that kind of stuff recently are, strangely, a religious organisation called Ahmya. That’s Japanese for Black Wind, by the way. Nothing much is known about them, but I have their address. It’s 11 Nakatomi, Shinjuku, Tokyo 160-0014. They were set up twenty years ago by a Japanese inventor who had made his fortune in robotics. His name is Ito Aritomo. I checked the Ahmya website and social-media accounts, and they do actually have several members with the names Akitsugu and Nashiko. I remember that you and Kieron heard the guy in charge of the mission mention them. Good luck, and be careful.

Bex lay back on her bed, feeling the stresses and strains of the journey and the past few days melt away like ice turning to water and trickling out of her body. A Japanese religious organisation? That was not necessarily a good thing. Given her training in intelligence and special operations, the first thing Bex thought of when she heard those words was the infamous Aum Shinrikyo cult from twenty-five years ago. They had released nerve gas onto the Tokyo subway system in some twisted plot to cause the end of the world – something that only members of the cult would survive. Thirteen people had died and over six thousand had been made ill by the poison. Members of the cult, including its leader, had been executed by the Japanese authorities and the cult itself split into two smaller groups who were now kept under observation by the Japanese police.

Cults. Interesting. Bex couldn’t help thinking of the Blood and Soil fascist group that had brought her and Kieron together. There seemed to be a common theme here. Was Avalon Richardson associating herself with cults and fascist groups around the world, or was this Ahmya group up to something else, by themselves? Something that required the PEREGRINE network? Difficult to know for sure, unless she did some investigation.

She sighed, and sat up. Much as she wanted to sleep for the next eight hours, she didn’t have time. She had to find out where the system encoder had been taken, and why? Time for a shower, then she’d get out on the streets.

Half an hour later she left the hotel and headed out into the chaos and madness of Tokyo, letting her mobile phone guide her with its mapping function. Still no ARCC kit to help: she was going old-school now.

The Tokyo pavements were narrow, and crammed with people despite the time of day. Most of them held mobile phones up; not to their ears but so they could see the screen. The light from the screens illuminated their faces in strange ways. Were they FaceTiming, looking at maps or watching movies? Bex couldn’t tell. Many of them had medical masks over their face; white, handkerchief-like bits of cloth held over their mouth and nose by white ribbons tied behind their head. The sight made Bex think about Aum Shinrikyo again, and she shivered, but she guessed the masks were more to stop people breathing in pollutants from the hundreds of taxis and ordinary cars that were crawling down the wide road.

She walked along the pavement. There seemed to be a flow to the pedestrians that surrounded her; two separate ribbons of people going in opposite directions, meaning that if you wanted to cross the ribbon that lay between you and a shop, a hotel or a restaurant, then you had to take care to avoid crashing into anyone. As she walked Bex could smell hundreds of different sweet, spicy and savoury odours drifting out of the many restaurants, and she suddenly realised she was hungry. Very hungry. But no time for that now.

She passed several pod hotels as she walked, and gave a silent prayer of thanks that Bradley hadn’t booked her into one of them, but somewhere more upmarket. Pod hotels were something that only the Japanese could have invented – instead of rooms they had ‘capsules’, which were roughly the width and length of a standard single bed, and just high enough for the occupant to be able to crawl inside and sit up. They were usually made of plastic, with walls that were a sterile white in colour. Sometimes they had a television screen and power sockets, but no toilet, bath, shower or basin. If you wanted a shower, you had to go to a shared area, like in a sports centre, and if you wanted a bath then you might end up in a communal one with ten other people. If you were staying in a pod hotel then you had to give up your clothes when you arrived and change into a traditional Japanese yukata robe that was provided by the management. The worst thing about them, as far as Bex was concerned, was that the capsules were stacked up in rows, and to get to the higher ones you had to climb a ladder. It must be a bit like living in a beehive, she thought, and shuddered. She guessed they were mainly used by businessmen, students and travellers trying to save money, but to her they sounded like a form of hell on Earth. People stacked up like produce in a warehouse. She wanted privacy and comfort from her hotel experience.

Eventually her phone told her that she was where she wanted to be. She looked up. Squeezed between a ramen noodle bar and a shop selling mobile phones and tablet computers, she spotted a doorway with a sign above it in English: Ahmya. Just that one word, and nothing else.

Nice of the bad guys to actually advertise their location, she thought. It made the whole process so much easier. This must be the traditional Japanese politeness and eagerness to please.

‘Would you like a free personality test?’ a voice said from beside her.

She turned. A small Japanese girl, maybe a few years younger than Bex, stood beside her. A small bubble of space seemed to have appeared around them; the two streams of human traffic passed by on either side, going in opposite directions, but they were isolated. The girl held a tablet computer in her hand. She had black hair, cut short, and her face seemed to shine with an inner radiance. Or it was very subtly and very competently made up to look that way. She wore a badge with ‘Ahmya’ written on it, along with a logo that featured a single black water droplet and the girl’s name, ‘Midori’. Quickly looking around, Bex could see four or five other young Japanese people with similar tablets. Probably bought from next door in bulk, Bex thought. They were intercepting passers-by.

‘Oh,’ Bex said, trying to sound surprised. ‘That would be nice.’ Actually, she had been expecting something like this to happen. Cults tended to be one of two kinds: those that kept to themselves, and mainly increased their number by members having lots of babies and bringing them up in the cult, and those that wanted to recruit new members off the street. That recruitment process often started out with a personality test or something similar, but it was always rigged to convince the person taking it that there was a hole in their life that only the cult could fill.

Midori smiled, even more than she was already smiling. ‘Let me start,’ she said. She touched her finger to the screen of the tablet, and said, ‘Do you normally bite your fingernails, or perhaps chew the end of your pencil or pen?’

‘Why, yes,’ Bex said. Not true, but she wanted to see where this would lead.

Midori ticked a box on the tablet screen. ‘Do you normally speak slowly, or fast?’

‘Slowly,’ Bex said. Actually she hadn’t got a clue what speed she normally spoke at, but she had a feeling that the answers didn’t really matter. Whatever she said, Midori was going to tell her that she had personality issues and should come inside to talk to someone about it. That was the way it worked. And somewhere down the line, once she was hooked, they would ask her for a financial contribution to keep the cult going. After that, when she was totally indoctrinated and separated from the real world, they would ask for her bank account details. Of course, she wasn’t going to let things go that far.

‘Do you think that your life is a constant struggle to achieve your goals?’

Bex considered the past six months of her life. ‘Oh yes,’ she said honestly.

And so it went on. Some of the questions were trivial, some were absurd and some were quite personal.

Eventually Midori looked up from her screen and said, ‘That completes the test. May I show you the results?’

‘Yes, please,’ Bex said, trying to look eager and vulnerable at the same time.

Midori turned the screen round so that Bex could see it. It showed a graph with a straight red line running horizontally across it, and a jagged black line that sometimes rose above the red one but mostly stayed below it. ‘The red line is a normal, healthy person with a good mental state,’ Midori said, sounding like she was reading from a script, ‘and the black line is you. As you can see, there are some issues with the way you interact with the world. You probably already know this: maybe you feel insecure, or uncertain, and often you feel unhappy without knowing why.’

Don’t we all? Bex thought. It was a clever scheme, she had to admit: playing on people’s basic weaknesses. They probably showed everyone the same graph. It was like horoscopes in newspapers; you could show the same horoscope to people who belonged to any of the twelve star signs and they would find a way of linking what was said to their own history and issues.

‘If you like,’ Midori said, ‘you could come inside and talk to one of our counsellors. They can give you some advice on how to change your life for the better.’

And start the process of pulling me into the cult, making me more and more dependent, Bex thought angrily, knowing that some people – impressionable teenagers usually, but also middle-aged people going through some kind of life crisis – could get sucked into this really fast, just because someone was showing an interest in them.

‘It’s completely free,’ Midori went on, taking Bex’s hesitation as uncertainty. ‘We in the Ahmya Order just want people to be happier in their lives. That is our goal, and our joy.’

‘That sounds great,’ Bex said, suppressing her anger. She had to look like a potential victim here. She tried to put on a hopeful expression.

‘Here.’ Midori reached out and pinned a laminated cardboard badge onto Bex’s jacket. It was blue, with the Ahmya symbol above the words ‘Ground Floor Only’. ‘This will get you into the building. Someone will guide you to a counsellor. I am sure they will make you feel much better, and give you hope for the future.’ She bowed.

‘Thank you,’ Bex said, bowing as well. She headed towards the doorway, but slowly, as if she was still unsure. Two people moved ahead of her on the pavement, trying to get past: one of them had a blue badge like hers, but the other had a red badge. Quickly trying to read the red badge as its owner went past, she made out the words ‘All Floors’ beneath the black raindrop.

That was what she needed; access to all floors of the cult’s HQ.

Bex listened out behind her as she drifted towards the doorway. Midori might be watching her, and she didn’t want to look like she was getting away. When she heard the girl’s voice say, ‘Would you like a free personality test?’ to someone else on the street she slipped sideways, into the crowd, merging with the stream of humanity that was passing by the Ahmya doorway.

She let the crowd carry her, past shoe stores and clothes stores and restaurants and hotels, until she spotted a print shop – somewhere you could get photocopies done, or things printed from USB sticks. She struggled sideways, out of the crowd and into the shop.

‘Can I help you?’ the teenager behind the counter asked in good English.

Bex held up the laminated badge. ‘I need fifty of these done, but in red and with a change of words,’ she said. She shrugged apologetically. ‘I’ve got a conference going on at a hotel nearby, and we’ve had far more people turn up than we were expecting. It’s some kind of administrative foul-up. We can’t let any of the attendees into the presentations and workshops they’ve signed up for unless they have a badge. Can you help me?’

The teenager took the laminated badge and looked at it. ‘I can scan this,’ he said, ‘then change text and background colour. Maybe I won’t get the shade exactly right, but I can get close.’

‘The would be fine,’ Bex said, relieved.

It took just twenty minutes for the badges to be printed off and laminated. The teenager didn’t query why Bex wanted copies of badges – either her cover story had convinced him or he just didn’t care. Bex only needed one badge – but just asking for that might have made the boy suspicious. She kept one badge and dumped the rest in a bin just down the street as she left.

As she approached the Ahmya doorway, Bex swapped the blue badge she had been given for a red one and put the blue one in her pocket. She glanced around to find Midori. The girl had cornered a Japanese boy, who looked mesmerised by her, and was going into her spiel. Knowing that Midori was distracted, Bex walked straight up to the door and pressed the entrance button.

The door opened. She walked in as if she had every right to do just that.

The entrance gave out into a large white lobby with a huge reception desk and a walk-through security scanner that looked more like it should have been located in an airport than in the headquarters of a religious organisation. A huge banner hung from the ceiling with a photograph of a kindly, smiling Japanese man with bushy white hair, beard and eyebrows. This, she presumed, was the inventor, robotics expert and founder of the Ahmya cult: Ito Aritomo. On the other side of the barrier Bex noticed a side lobby with three lifts.

Movement on the edges of her vision caught Bex’s attention. She glanced left and right, and froze where she stood. Two things were approaching her from alcoves on either side of the security scanner. For a moment her mind went blank as it scrabbled to identify what she was seeing. Finally it came to her with a rush of amazement; they were robots! They looked a bit like mechanical centaurs, she supposed, with four legs and a stocky body about the size of a small pony, and an elevated front end topped by a ‘head’ sporting video cameras and lights. From their ‘shoulders’ extended two arms, that looked like they had more joints than a human limb. The arms ended in things that were halfway between hands and claws.

Each robot had a red ‘All Floors’ badge attached to the centre of its chest.

Bex glanced at their bodies. She couldn’t see any weapons, but she wouldn’t be surprised if they were there. Hidden.

Ito Aritomo was a robotics expert, or so Bradley had said in his message. He obviously trusted robot security guards more than he trusted people.

Bex put her fingers beneath the red badge and pulled it away from her body, displaying it to the two robots. They dipped their heads, taking in the image of the badge through the lenses of their cameras, then moved back to where they had been standing.

‘You may enter,’ a mechanical voice said. The robot was obviously clever enough to spot from her face that she was not Japanese.

Bex walked towards the security barrier. She moved through it as if she did the same thing every day. There was a beep, but nobody tried to stop her. She wasn’t carrying any guns or explosives. Maybe the scanner was calibrated to look for recording devices as well; most religious cults had an issue with journalists trying to get inside, looking for stories. She was OK; she didn’t have any of those either.

Once past the barrier, Bex walked towards the lifts. A sign beside the lift doors labelled in both Japanese and English indicated that the ‘Ahmya Institute’ occupied ten floors in the building. The ground floor was Reception and Processing; the next three floors were labelled Presentations and Induction; floor five was Administration; floors six to eight were labelled Outreach and International while the top two floors had been reserved for Executive Operations and Directors.

Where to go? Bex had to keep moving, otherwise people would start to suspect her. Everyone around her was well dressed, perfectly coiffured and smiling. They smiled at each other, and they smiled a thin air if nobody was around them. Obviously the Ahmya Institute was a happy place to be. Or maybe there were punishments if they didn’t keep smiling.

Administration. That was probably the best place to start. She entered the leftmost lift of the three and pressed the button for the fifth floor.

She was the only person in the lift, and she took a moment to breathe calmly and compose her face into a happy smile before the door opened and she walked out again.

Another robot security guard stood just by the lift doors. It scanned her badge, and its ‘head’ nodded briefly before it turned away. She was safe, for the moment.

The administration level contained numerous desks with computers on, and rows of young people sat at them, working. They all wore headsets with microphones, and they all wore the same clothes – white shirt or blouse, and black trousers or skirt. Most of them were talking to someone via their headset. Bex heard Japanese being spoken, along with maybe ten other languages, including English, German and Chinese. This looked like a massive fundraising exercise. The workers at the desks were probably phoning people around the world, using numbers from a database that Ahmya had either built up themselves or bought, a database of targets who might be inclined to make donations to a religious organisation. People who had suffered a bereavement recently, or people who had just come into an inheritance or cashed in their pension, sad and lonely people who would welcome the chance to talk to someone sympathetic on the phone and would be liable to give out their bank details.

Bex hated it. She hated anyone who tried to take advantage of those who were grieving, or uncertain, or vulnerable in some other way.

No photographs, she noticed. No pictures of parents or siblings or pets. No potted plants or vinyl figures of characters from films, games or graphic novels. Nothing personal at all. Each desk was perfectly anonymous. This was probably a hot-desk setup, where the kids came in at the beginning of their shifts and took the first available space.

All of the desks were occupied. That was a problem. Bex didn’t want to just stand there, waiting for a spot to become free.

She felt a giggle well up inside her, and ruthlessly suppressed it. Her mind had just thrown up a picture of the beginning of a shift, with all the kids turning up at the same time and then scrambling for desks like some kind of work-related version of musical chairs.

Yes, the darker part of her mind piped up, but what happens to the kids who can’t get a desk? Do they get punished?

She had to move before the security robot got suspicious. She walked up to the end of a row, where a teenager with acne and long hair pulled back into a ponytail sat talking into his microphone. He was speaking in English, which was why she chose him. She tapped him on the shoulder. He turned his head.

‘You are required in Induction,’ she said firmly.

His face took on an expression of horror. ‘Me? Now? What have I done wrong?’

‘Only you know that. Go. They’re waiting for you.’

He tore his headset off and scrambled out of his seat and towards the lifts. Bex felt guilty about what she had just done, but it was necessary, and the best way to get what you wanted in an authoritarian regime was to assume authority and give orders. People were likely to follow them without question.

Bex slipped into the vacated seat. She probably had five minutes to do what she needed before the poor kid got down to Induction and realised that nobody was waiting for him.

She reached into her pocket and took out a small USB device that Bradley had provided. It took her a few moments to work out where the USB sockets were on the computer – on the left-hand side of the screen, she realised. She reached out and plugged the device in. Instantly a green LED started flashing, indicating that the device was hoovering up as much data as it could from the system. It was possible that the kid only had access to superficial levels of the computer network, but as Bex didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, she had to start somewhere.

Maybe remove the LED bulb, she thought. She would have a word with Bradley. She was uncomfortably aware of it flashing away, attracting attention. She looked around for something she could use to hide it, but there was nothing on the desk she could use. Literally nothing.

After what seemed an eternity, the light stopped flashing. The device had absorbed all the data it could find.

Bex pulled it out.

A metal hand clutched her shoulder.

‘You do not belong here,’ an artificial voice said.

She turned her head, making sure to keep smiling. ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.

One of the robotic security guards stood beside her. Its expression was inflexible – metal, glass and wires – but it looked fierce. ‘The Ahmya Order does not allow intruders, thieves or investigators on its premises. You will come with me.’

Its metal claw-hand tightened painfully on her shoulder, compressing muscle against bone. She grimaced, hoping the thing knew when to stop. Humans were so much more vulnerable than robots.