CHAPTER TWELVE

Bex stared into the ‘face’ of the security robot. There was no possibility of sympathy there, nothing she could play on; only a pre-programmed dedication to duty. Appealing to its better nature wasn’t going to achieve anything.

She stood up suddenly. The robot was so close to her that she brushed against its uniform jacket, knocking the red ‘All Floors’ access badge off its chest.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ she exclaimed. Before the robot could do anything she bent down and scooped the badge off the floor. Straightening up again, she reattached it –

– Except that the badge she attached wasn’t the one that had fallen. It was the blue ‘Ground Floor Only’ badge she had been given earlier by Midori, outside. Fortunately the security robot didn’t notice.

‘Come this way,’ it said, taking hold of her arm firmly with a metal hand about the size of her head.

As they got to the lobby area with the three sets of lift doors, she stepped firmly and abruptly away from the robot. Taken by surprise, and with its balance momentarily upset, it let go of her arm before it could be pulled right over.

The central lift doors opened. Three white-shirted young cult members stepped out, while behind them another security robot stood, patiently waiting for the doors to close again and the lift to take them up to the floor where it worked. Somewhere on the executive levels.

‘Please!’ she said, looking at the robot in the lift and trying to look concerned. Well, it wasn’t much of a reach, to be honest. ‘I don’t think that this thing belongs here!’ She pointed at the security robot. More particularly, she pointed at its badge.

The robot in the lift pushed the ‘Door open’ button. ‘Kore wa shin’nyu-shadesu!’ it said loudly in the automated voice that all the robots shared.

Within moments, an alarm started to sound, and a recorded voice on the PA system shouted ‘Shin’nyu-sha! Shin’nyu-sha!’ over and over. Bex guessed that was the Japanese for ‘Intruder!’

The previously calm administrative floor suddenly became a scene of panic and chaos. The young people operating the phone lines all reached out and switched their computers off, then stood up as if to attention, holding their badges out so they could be seen. They must have been trained to do that, so that an intruder couldn’t access information and would easily be identified and caught.

The ‘head’ of the security robot that had caught Bex looked around, then tilted so it could look at its own security badge. Bex thought she caught a slight flinch in its metal shoulders and a tensing of its legs. Bex didn’t know what happened to intruders in the Ahmya building, but she didn’t think it would be a firm telling-off before being escorted off the premises. It looked a lot more serious than that. She had no idea how much or how little of a real ‘personality’ these robots had – artificial intelligence was not her subject – but it seemed to know that something was wrong and it wanted to survive. It started to run – well, lumber, to be fair – towards a fire door off to one side. The emergency stairs, Bex guessed. She didn’t know if it was going to try to head for the ground floor and hope nobody noticed or get to someone who could vouch for it and explain that a mistake had been made. She didn’t actually care. She just wanted to get out herself.

The doors for the left-hand lift opened. Another security robot cantered out, holding what looked like a Taser. Bex slipped inside and pressed the button for the ground floor. The lift doors slid closed, and she took a deep breath.

The alarm was sounding on the ground floor as well. She straightened her back, smiled, and walked directly towards the exit onto the street. Everyone around seemed either paralysed or panicked by the repeating alarm.

Midori stood on the pavement outside, staring into the building. She glanced at Bex. ‘Please, what is happening?’

‘They’re testing the fire alarm,’ Bex said calmly. ‘They’ve asked me to come back tomorrow, when they haven’t got so much on.’

She walked off, feeling an itch in the middle of her back. Nobody is looking, she told herself. Nobody is chasing after you. But the itch kept itching until she had gone around the corner and was out of sight of the Ahmya building.

Halfway back to her hotel she stopped at a sushi and sashimi bar, partly to check that nobody was following her and partly to get some food. She was suddenly hungry, and some sushi seemed like a great idea right then. The place was small, with only ten seats, all of which were placed along a conveyor belt that came out of a hatch, travelled slowly along the length of one wall, then vanished into another hatch. Small plates covered with transparent plastic domes sat on the conveyor belt. The plates were various colours, and each one had a small portion of sushi or sashimi on it. Bex knew that the colours of the plates reflected the price, and a woman sitting at a till by the door was counting how many plates the leaving patrons had, and what colours they were. She sat and watched the food going past her, wondering which to take. They all looked so good.

The great thing about sushi was that it was quick; she ate, and was out of there within five minutes. Ten minutes after that she was back at her hotel.

She tried the ARCC link again, but this time it was actually down, inoperative, rather than nobody answering. It looked like she was going to have to do this herself, the old-fashioned way.

Her tablet computer had a USB port on the side, and the chip and memory had been upgraded by Bradley so that it was a lot more capable that it looked on the outside. Bex had also loaded it with high-grade security analysis programs that weren’t generally available on the open market. She booted it up, and set the programs running on the data she had stolen while she had another shower. By the time she came back, refreshed, the programs had finished their work and were proudly displaying their results.

The software had been designed to take a raw set of data and pull out whatever patterns it could, displaying them as an overlapping series of windows. In this case, Bex could see organisational charts for the Ahmya order, lists of members and what level they had reached within the organisation, sites and properties owned by the order, people around the world who had contributed financially, and people who might contribute in the future … Basically, a full description of how the order was set up.

First, Bex checked the list of properties. The main office block that she had just left was listed, as well as several other properties scattered around Japan – mostly in rural locations. These were probably ‘retreats’, where recent converts were separated from their real life and family and pulled further into the cult. Five locations, however, were just listed as ‘Operations Sites’, with no further description. One of those was probably what she was looking for. Probably.

Next she checked for purchase records or financial transactions, to see if she could tie in the satellite tracking equipment whose sale Bradley had told her about with any of the locations, but if it was listed then it was under some generic name, like ‘Electronic equipment’ or ‘Computer equipment’ that she couldn’t connect with anything. She sat back for a moment, considering.

Staff lists. The Ahmya team who had attacked the Falkland Islands satellite control station had included members with the first names Akitsugu and Nashiko. She quickly cross-referenced the personnel records of the entire organisation with the lists of where people had been posted.

Two of the mysterious ‘Operations Site’ locations had staff with the first names Akitsugu and Nashiko. But which was the one she wanted?

Ah. Geographical location. Nobody in their right mind would put a satellite control station in a valley, because its view of the sky would be blocked. Satellite control stations were generally in the middle of large open expanses of land, like the one in the Falklands, or on top of hills or mountains.

Bex checked the geographical locations of the two sites. One of them was right in the centre of the city of Kyoto. She could rule that one out straight away. The other sat at the highest point on a hill in Tochigi Prefecture, about 180 kilometres away. It looked like a rural, mountainous area. Remote.

If that wasn’t her target, then she didn’t know what she was going to do.

She phoned Bradley’s mobile, hoping to be able to pass on the details of what she had found, but he didn’t answer. Rather than leave a message she wrote a quick email, encrypted it, then sent it.

She tried the ARCC system again. In the time since she had last tried it, some of the satellites had obviously been turned back on. She could get a link to England, but neither Kieron nor Bradley was answering.

A feeling of dread swept over Bex, like a tsunami suddenly appearing on the horizon and sweeping in within moments to devastate a beach. Why couldn’t she get hold of Bradley? Why wasn’t anybody at the other end of the ARCC kit to give her support?

She phoned Kieron on his burner phone. No answer. She tried Sam. Again, no answer.

This was getting serious. Bex felt a sudden shiver run through her. What had happened back in England? Part of her wanted to throw everything into her suitcase, get a taxi to the airport and return home to see what was going on, but she stopped herself. She had a mission. She had to succeed at this end of things, and trust the others to succeed at theirs.

She stood at the window, gazing out at distant lights across the bay and trying to calm her racing heart.

She didn’t often think about the other nine teams that were using the ARCC equipment. They were all freelancers, like her and Bradley, but it wasn’t like they all got together once a year for a party. None of the nine teams knew who the others were. Bex and Bradley did their missions – using the kit they had designed, of course – and let the other teams get on with theirs. The problem was that with the PEREGRINE satellite network suffering from sabotage, and shutting down intermittently, those other teams were in the same position she was: an agent, undercover somewhere dangerous, suddenly unable to get access to the information and intelligence they needed.

Bex suddenly felt a real kinship with those other agents. She felt their anxiety and confusion.

She shook her head. The best thing she could do for everyone was to get to that mystery Ahmya site and stop them from trying to take control of the satellites – and maybe discover why the organisation wanted the PEREGRINE network at all.

Without the ARCC system. Without Bradley or Kieron. Without support.

What was that phrase Bradley liked to quote? ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’

Time to get going. Or just go; she wasn’t sure how the grammar worked out there.

Bex took everything out of her rucksack apart from some basic tools and the thermal suit that she had worn in the Falkland Islands, then left her room. She wasn’t sure if she would need the thermal suit, but it was better to have it and not use it than not have it and suddenly need it.

The concierge down in the hotel lobby arranged for a hire car to be booked for her. With typical Japanese efficiency, within twenty minutes the car pulled up outside the hotel – a black Toyota RAV4. The driver got out, gave her the keys, then flagged down a taxi to take him back to wherever he was based. Fortunately the Japanese drove on the left-hand side of the road, as they did in England, so Bex didn’t have to mentally adjust her mindset. She got in and started the car.

The car-hire company had very kindly set the satnav system to English rather than Japanese, but Bex quickly discovered that it still wasn’t much help. She tried typing in ‘Tochigi’, but the device’s computer didn’t recognise the name. Perhaps she had spelled it incorrectly. She tried ‘Mount Nantai’ and ‘Mount Nyoho’, which, according to the Internet were both peaks in the mountain range near where she wanted to go, but the system couldn’t find them either. Obviously she was missing some subtlety in the Japanese language. She tried ‘Nikko’ and ‘Kanuma’ as well, which were nearby towns, but again they weren’t recognised. How, she wondered despairingly, could she get ‘Nikko’ wrong? Eventually she decided that she just had to use the satnav on her phone, but she did make sure she downloaded the map of the area around Tokyo to her phone’s memory first. The chances of getting an Internet signal out in the middle of nowhere seemed slim, and she didn’t want to suddenly be told, two hours into her journey, that her phone had no idea where she was.

Setting out, Bex found herself driving north out of Tokyo. The first twenty minutes or so were stop-start, stop-start at the many sets of traffic lights, but soon enough she was heading through the suburbs and into the countryside. Once out of the city, traffic was strangely quiet, and also strangely slow. Even on the main motorway, Japanese drivers seemed to be very cautious, and also very polite. Most cars drove at speeds that were much lower than would have been the case on similar roads in England or America, and the cars that were going faster, overtaking the others, tended to be driven by Westerners. Or Japanese teenagers. Or a frustrated MI6 agent who was desperate to get to where she needed to go.

She also found, about forty-five minutes into her journey, that there were toll roads – and each of the sections of toll road appeared to operate in a different way. With some you paid in advance, at a toll booth, and were given a set of vouchers which you had to hand in at various stations along the road to be allowed to continue. With others you were given a single voucher and had to stick it into a machine every ten miles or so for validation, along with a payment, before you could go on. Bex had to improvise each time, feeling frustration and anger gnawing at her stomach. All the road signs were in Japanese, of course, and Bex had to rely on her phone to keep her going in the right direction. As she drove, she kept switching her attention from the phone’s screen to the views outside the car, and then back again. She did manage to marvel at the Japanese countryside, however; the dark green forests; the snow-capped peaks of the distant mountains; the geometrically regular fields planted presumably with rice, soya and other crops. She passed what seemed to be several religious shrines and temples, presumably dedicated to one of the two main Japanese religions – Shinto or Buddhism. This was definitely Japan.

After about ninety minutes she found herself heading into a region of hills, backed by distant mountains. She was hungry, and every so often she passed a stall on the side of the road that was selling fruit or fish or meat, but she kept driving. She had a job to do, and every second might count.

The number of cars that were driving alongside or past her had progressively dropped, the further north she went, and the number of Western faces had also reduced, to the point where she appeared to be the only gaijin – Westerner – on the road or off it. Soon the road itself narrowed, and she was heading uphill along a series of switchbacks and sudden hairpin turns that, on her satnav, looked like someone had just scribbled on the screen rather than actually drawn a route. Now it was an event if another car passed her by. She had left the usual tourist highways and byways, and was truly in the heart of Japan – with only a satnav and an unreliable mobile-phone translation service to help her.

Eventually she had climbed so high that she emerged from the treeline to find herself almost at the top of what was either a very large hill or a small, wide mountain. She knew from long-ago geography lessons that the treeline was the highest point at which the trees could grow. Above that point the cold air and the lack of moisture meant that seeds would not germinate.

A mist had drawn in, or perhaps she was actually up in low clouds. Either way, it meant she couldn’t see very far. What she could see, however, was a fence and, beyond it, a large, circular building, right on the highest point of the hill. Or the mountain. Whatever. This, according to her satnav, was her destination.

The building looked like a series of white plates of different sizes, placed upside down and arranged with the biggest at the bottom and the smallest at the top. On the flat surface on top of the highest and smallest ‘plate’ Bex saw what she assumed were the things that transmitted messages to and from the satellites. Rather than the large satellite dishes she had been expecting, however, like the control station in the Falkland Islands, the installation here was topped with five white domes made up of a series of smaller triangular elements. Maybe they had the satellite dishes inside, and were meant to be aesthetic, or a protection from the weather. They looked strangely like huge golf balls; which was ironic, Bex thought, considering the apparent fascination that the Japanese had with golf. If it wasn’t for the mist she reckoned she could have seen ten or fifteen golf courses on the flat landscape below.

She backed her car down into the treeline again, and parked it off the road, then spent a few minutes breaking branches off the nearest bushes to partially cover it from sight. No point in being obvious. Her breath clouded in front of her, and she could feel the cold air nipping at her fingertips, ears and cheekbones. She should have thought this through, she told herself ruefully. She should have brought some cold-weather clothing before she left Tokyo. Just a woollen hat and gloves would have helped. She half considered putting on the thermal suit that she had brought with her in her rucksack, but the problem with that was that it was too effective. She would suffer heat exhaustion if she kept it on for more than fifteen minutes.

Before leaving the car, she tried turning on the ARCC glasses again. Again, the system was in one of its blank times, where the satellites were unavailable. And somewhere in that building at the top of the hill was the force that kept turning them off. Frustrating.

She tried her mobile phone, but she couldn’t get any signal. Hardly surprising.

She emerged from the treeline again on foot, keeping low, and crept towards the fence, rucksack on her back.

The road that she had been on went past the control station, with a spur leading off and up to a massive sliding gate set into the fence. The fence itself was topped with what looked like razor wire. Getting over that without slicing her hands and arms to shreds would be impossible. She could see no guards; no security booth; no way of getting in. She also couldn’t see any cameras on poles, as there had been at the Falkland Islands control station. How did any authorised visitors enter?

As she got closer, she saw a box on a pole, just next to the gate. Presumably visitors would have a code, or the box contained a voice link to a security post inside the buildings. If the ARCC kit had been working, and if anybody had been answering her calls, she could have used it to hack into the box and open the gate, but that wasn’t an option now.

She was just about to move out of cover and see if she could use the same trick on the security fence as she had in the Falkland Islands, when something moved off to her left. She ducked behind a bush.

A security robot, identical to the ones she had seen in the Ahmya building in Tokyo, trotted steadily along the perimeter of the fence. Outside the fence, where she was. And in its hands it held a very large and very powerful machine gun.