Survival (10 page)

“Go ahead, Jimmy.” The reception was crackly
because they were so far underground, but the words
were still clear.

“Listen carefully,” Jimmy snapped into the radio.
“You’ve got twelve hours to radio me with evidence that
my mum, my sister and Felix are safe. After that, I
destroy this mine and everything around it.”

Immediately he switched the radio off and thrust it
into Marla’s hand. “Take this,” he ordered. “I don’t want
them tracking me.”

“But what are you doing?”

“I told you,” said Jimmy. “I’m working for me, not
them. I have to make certain the French are going to
do what I ask. The only way to do that is to have
something they value. Something they really value.”

He lifted the suitcase slightly. Marla backed away
instinctively, even though the actinium was insulated now.

“They told me this actinium was valuable to them,” he
went on. “And I plan to make it even more valuable.
They’ll have no choice but to help me.”

Together they started back up the stairs. At the
top Jimmy hesitated. “You want to help me, right?”
he whispered.

“I want to help you if you are against the French,”
replied Marla.

“Meet me at midnight in the dock,” Jimmy said
quickly. Through his mind flashed the plans of the
Mutam-ul-it complex – dozens of images every second.
He hadn’t even realised while he’d been looking at
Stovorsky’s laptop that these diagrams would take root
in his head so strongly. “At the fifth pier,” he announced.
Marla nodded. “Bring a balaclava. And paper clips. Lots
of them. Oh, and transport. Something fast, but small…”

“Wait,” said Marla. “Midnight? That is only seven hours.”

“I know. Counting is one of my special powers.”

Jimmy turned and pressed his hand on the door, but
Marla stopped him.

“What if that man radios with what you asked for?
What if they take your family out of danger?”

Jimmy hesitated for only a second, then, just as he
burst out into daylight, he announced his decision.
“They won’t.”

“Evidence?!” raged Stovorsky. “Twelve hours?! How dare
he!” He jumped up and down next to the off-roader, not
caring that he was stumbling in and out of the shade
and the top of his head was getting burned.

“But it’s OK,” urged his driver, trying to remain calm.

“Zafi can make them safe, then we’ll let Jimmy know.”

“But what if she can’t? We’re not Jimmy’s personal
family protection force, we’re the French Secret Service!”

At last Stovorsky stopped jumping. There was an
uneasy silence. Then he ripped off his raincoat and
hurled it into the back seat. The sweat marks on his suit
made him look like a balding, angry panda.

“Send a message to Zafi,” he ordered. “Get that
evidence. We can’t risk the mine.”

“Tell her to get Jimmy’s family to safety?”

“No!” barked Stovorsky. “I don’t care whether she
actually does it – as long as we can give Jimmy some
kind of proof. Whether it’s real or not.” He stared
blankly at his laptop screen. “We can’t risk the mine,”
he whispered.

After a moment of thought, he tapped at his laptop
again. The only way they could watch Jimmy was through
the satellite aerial feed to the computer. Stovorsky
studied the images. They were amazingly detailed, but
large areas were obscured by the smoke still billowing
from the mine compound across the desert sky.

“Where are you, Jimmy?” said Stovorsky, his voice rising
with frustration. Then he launched a violent attack at
the flies round his head. “Jimmy!” he yelled, flapping wildly.

“Calm down!” pleaded the young soldier. “We can still
control what he does.”

“Control him?” said Stovorsky. “He’s gone rogue. You
don’t control a rogue. You destroy it.”

Jimmy deliberately aimed for the thickest areas of the
smoke. He knew they’d give him the perfect protection
from the satellite imagery. He marched through the
compound. When he reached the perimeter he didn’t
stop. The wire fence was over twenty metres high, but
even with the fingers of his right hand locked around the
handle of the lead-lined suitcase, he scaled it in seconds.

On the other side he waited just a few seconds, trying
to read the gusts of wind that came in off the ocean and
carried the smoke over the desert in a dense plume.
That was his escape – his way out of Mutam-ul-it while
Stovorsky was watching him from above.

He chose a moment when the smog was at its thickest
and advanced. He stood as straight and as tall as he could,
consciously making every step exactly the same length.
And he counted each stride.
One, two, three, four
…

“Georgie!” Felix yelled over his shoulder. “There’s a French
super-assassin here to murder us. What should I do?”

Zafi couldn’t help laughing. “You’re lucky NJ7 can’t
hear a word we’re saying right now, thanks to a wedge
of your disgusting English cheese and a flock of pigeons.”

She moved quickly into the flat, shut the door firmly
behind her and brushed past Felix.

“
My
cheese?” Felix asked. “Whatever. I knew all that,
you big… weirdo.”

Georgie ran into the hallway. When she saw Zafi
she froze in shock. The last time they’d seen each
other felt like a lifetime ago – Zafi had once been sent
to persuade Jimmy to join the French Secret Service
and she’d delivered the message a little too violently
for Georgie to remember the meeting fondly.

“What are you doing here?” Georgie asked sharply.

“Where’s your mum?” Zafi replied.

“She’s out. She’s looking for…” Georgie stopped
herself and pointed around the corners of the ceiling.
“Can they…?”

“We’ve got about two minutes before NJ7 have
their surveillance back. So talk fast then I’ll tell you
everything you need to know. After that you call me
Rhys and pretend I’m here to hang out with you.
I might even need to stay the night.”

“Why
are
you here?” asked Georgie.

“Have you found my parents?” Felix cut in. “I knew
you’d do it! The moustache man got in touch with you,
didn’t he?”

Zafi pushed the hoodie from her head. Her hair
tumbled down round her shoulders and she turned to
smile at Felix. “I’m sorry, Felix; 80 per cent of the time
I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“It’s more like 95 per cent for the rest of us,”
Georgie chipped in.

“I don’t mind,” Zafi added. “You’re still cute.”

Felix’s grin nearly burst the sides of his cheeks.

“Would you hurry up and explain, please?” Georgie
insisted.

“I was sent here by Uno Stovorsky,” said Zafi quickly.
“I have to protect you. That’s all I know. If we need to
move out of here, I’ll take care of it. So relax.”

“Is it…” Georgie looked across at Felix and broke into
a smile. “It might be because of your parents, or it
might be Jimmy.”

“I just follow my instructions,” said Zafi with a shrug.

“He’s coming back, isn’t he?” Georgie asked,
growing more and more agitated. “To stop Britain
attacking France, right? I saw it on the news: Dad
said… I mean, the Prime Minister said the French blew
up that oil rig. But it was Jimmy, wasn’t it?”

“Jimmy blew up an oil rig?” said Felix. “He must be
having so much fun while we’re…”

“Don’t worry, Felix,” Zafi cooed. “We can have fun too.”

Felix’s mouth dropped open.

“You are so cool,” he gasped.

Georgie was still thinking aloud. “But if Jimmy
did
blow it up and he comes back to prove it wasn’t the
French, he’ll be putting us in danger. So—”

“Time’s up,” Zafi announced. “Get to know Rhys.” She
quickly wrapped her hair into a bundle and stuffed it
back into her hoodie, which she pulled over her head
again. “What is there to do around here?”

…
Twenty-one thousand, six hundred and ninety-seven,
twenty-one thousand, six hundred and ninety-eight,
twenty-one thousand, six hundred and ninety-
nine
…

Jimmy had been marching for over three hours. The
protection of the smoke had long since disappeared.
Instead there were now vultures over his head. The
landscape had changed gradually from the patchy tufts
of low grass near the mine, to arid wasteland, and now
he was deep in the rolling sand dunes, constantly shifting
in the wind. Jimmy felt as if the sun had built a cocoon
of fire around him and he was condemned to walk
through it until he was a flame himself. His skin was
screaming for relief. His mouth was totally desiccated.

Every injury he had suffered in his short life was
coming back to remind him of the original torture – his
left leg, where it had once been through an industrial
shredder; his neck where he’d once plunged his own
tooth into his flesh to escape from a strangling; his
hands and feet, where the extreme cold of the Pyrenees
had frozen him; his ribs, his back, his shoulders… and
the physical memory of every blow Mitchell and Zafi
had ever planted on his body.

But at the same time he never lost that feeling that
there was something inside him driving him on. It was like
an engine fuelled by the heat, not damaged by it. He didn’t
realise it, but his DNA responded to the desert conditions
by controlling the dilation of his blood capillaries, the angle
of the hairs on his skin, the flow of sweat from his
pores… all to lessen the impact of dehydration.

Every five hundred strides he swapped the suitcase
to his other hand, in case the weight imbalance made
one leg stronger than the other. He didn’t want to end
up walking in a huge circle. And now he calculated he
was almost fourteen kilometres from the mine. It
would have to be enough.

He stopped dead on twenty-two thousand strides and
marked the sand with his heel. This was the spot. He
dropped the suitcase to the ground and fell to his
knees. Then he started to dig.

He burrowed into the sand as if he was swimming a
furious front crawl directly downwards. His skin was
raw and the sand was hotter than he could have
imagined, but he didn’t slow down. His programming
and his human mind were working in perfect unison,
formulating a plan and accelerating the operating
system within his body to carry it out.

His arms whirled like fans, opening up a gaping hole
beneath him. The sand shifted so quickly it fell back into
the space as soon as Jimmy had created it, so he
worked even faster to stay ahead of it.

Eventually Jimmy stopped – he was more than a metre
below the surface. The heat was still incredibly strong, but
he could feel the air changing quickly. Soon the sun would
go down and the temperature would plummet.

He jumped out of the hole and threw the suitcase in.
The wind would do most of the filling in work for him, but
he helped it along without even pausing to catch his breath.

Then he turned around to start the twenty-two
thousand strides back.

Georgie twisted past two defenders, sprinted to the top
of the box and chipped the ball over the keeper’s head.
It glided into the back of the net.

“Goal of the century,” she declared, throwing the
console controller on to the sofa in triumph and dancing
round the room. “Surely there’s no way back now for
poor old Felix Muzbeke.”

She pouted and ruffled his hair, mussing it even
further out of control than usual. She didn’t bother
picking up the controller again. In the final thirty
seconds of injury time Felix just tried to get his players
to run into each other, without success.

At the final whistle he couldn’t stop himself beaming,
even though he’d lost 4–1. He could hardly believe that he
was enjoying himself so much. His parents might be missing
and his best friend Jimmy was probably in mortal danger
somewhere, but for one evening he remembered what
it was like to relax and have a laugh. Maybe Zafi turning
up had given him hope that things were going to change.

He didn’t even mind that his only company was two
girls. Zafi and Georgie sat on either side of him on the
sofa, taking it in turns to beat him at FIFA Soccer. Felix
always put more effort into getting his players to do
tricks than score goals. He judged who won based on
the teams’ styles, not the score line.

“Don’t you have any other games?” Zafi asked. She’d
won her last match 9–3.

Felix and Georgie looked at each other, both knowing
that the only decent ones they had were other football
games. Everything else was just a British imitation of a
banned American or Japanese game. They could both
remember the time Felix had found what he thought was
a real American game at a stall in Hackney Wick Market.
But when he got it home, everything was in Dutch and
one half of the screen froze up every five seconds.

“Let’s stick to this one,” Georgie suggested. “But we
have to beat Felix by ten goals and he has to score with
a bicycle kick.”

“Bring it on,” said Felix, gripping the controller with
even more concentration.

They played on for a while, but the console itself was
also a British copy of a foreign brand. It soon crashed.

“How about a board game?” Felix suggested. He
jumped over to the cupboard and pulled out a pile of
old boxes, balanced precariously on top of each other.
Georgie and Zafi groaned.

Just then, Zafi drew her phone out of her pocket and
read a new message.

“What is it?” asked Felix, his whole body electrified with
excitement. “New instructions? Is it the moustache man?”

“Nothing,” Zafi shrugged. She placed the phone on
the coffee table in front of them, then announced
brightly, “Let’s play Monopoly.”

“Is that what your message said?” Georgie asked,
sarcastically.

“It said I should kill you, but it can wait until after a
board game.” There was a second of silence before Zafi
burst out laughing. “What happened to your sense of
humour?” she roared.

“Hilarious,” said Georgie, not smiling. She grabbed
the Monopoly set. “Right,” she announced, tearing off
the lid. “I’ll be the little dog.”

By the time Helen Coates arrived home a couple of
hours later, she found three people engrossed in a very
loud game of Monopoly. She waited in the doorway
to the living room, watching.

“Your go, Felix,” said Zafi. “I landed safe.”

“You’re not safe!” Felix roared. “I own that. And I have
a house on it. You owe me gazillions of pounds.”

“Can’t I stay for free?” asked Zafi, fluttering
her eyelashes.

“You might be playing some weird French rule,”
Georgie cut in, “but we’re doing fine with the English
version.” She counted out the money from Zafi’s pile
and handed it over to Felix.

“Thanks, mate,” said Felix, waving the notes in
Zafi’s face.

“Don’t you have homework to do?” Helen interrupted.

Felix and Georgie looked up at her, then to Zafi, then
back to Helen. Nobody needed to explain anything. The
hoodie hiding Zafi from surveillance told almost the whole
story.
She must be here to protect us
, Helen thought,
studying what she could see of Zafi’s face.
But from what
?

At the same time, Helen’s sombre expression told
Felix and Georgie that she still hadn’t been able to find
Christopher Viggo. She spent every day looking for
him. While she pretended to be looking for a job, she
tracked down old contacts and followed the trail of the
ex-NJ7 agent, the man they needed to help find Felix’s
parents, or make the country safe for Jimmy to come
home to, or change anything about Britain.

“Don’t worry,” Helen whispered. “I’ll find something
very soon.”

Mutam-ul-it blended into the black of the desert. Boosted
by his night-vision, Jimmy saw it as a mass of obscure blue
shapes on the horizon. He staggered towards it, trying
to maintain the regular beat of his steps, but fighting
the stiffness in his legs and the dryness in his throat.

His teeth chattered and his skin felt like it was on
fire, despite the sharp cold of the wind. At last Jimmy
reached the perimeter fence. He climbed over it at the
same spot he’d used before and lurched between the
burnt-out buildings of the compound.

After another minute he’d found Marla’s abandoned
jeep and begun his rehydration with water from the
engine, filtering it through a fist of sand. Now a little
strength oozed back into his limbs. He was surprised at
how quickly he felt the benefit of just a little water. Yet
again, he was thankful for the incredible design of his body.

With new optimism he marched all the way through
the compound to the other side, well over a kilometre
away. Here the buildings were unaffected by the blasts
from the British missiles. The rush of the sea grew louder
as he approached and at last he reached the line of piers.

For a second he imagined how refreshing it would be
to carry on walking, all the way to the end of the first
pier and straight into the water. The only thing that
stopped him was not knowing whether the water would
soothe or irritate his ravaged skin.

His muscles interrupted his thoughts, clenching
tighter. His programming was telling him to focus again.
He couldn’t stop now. His job was just beginning.

Giant storehouses loomed over him. This was
where, normally, the minerals from the mine would
have waited to be loaded on to ships and carried
around the world. But the ships were missing. The
whole of Mutam-ul-it had been evacuated – even this
end. Now the whole dock was deserted.

Jimmy scurried along the seafront, counting off the
piers, until he came to the fifth. The spray of the sea
formed a thin mist across the dock. Up ahead, the soft
light of a solitary security light filtered through the haze.
In it, Jimmy saw a girl’s silhouette, leaning against the
pier’s handrail and hugging herself to keep warm.
He jogged towards her.

“Is that you?” Marla whispered, startled by the
knocking of Jimmy’s boots on the wooden slats. He was
very close before she was able to make him out for
sure. “What have you done with the suitcase?”

Jimmy wasn’t in the mood to explain. “Did you bring
what I told you to?” he asked.

Marla ignored him. “Where is the actinium?” she
insisted.

“It’s safe,” said Jimmy, growing impatient. “Now, did
you bring what I asked you?”

Marla reached into her pocket and pulled out a
handful of paper clips. “I did not find baklava,” she said
sheepishly.

“Not
baklava
,” Jimmy sighed. “That’s a Turkish
dessert. I said
balaclava
!”

Marla’s face fell. “What is balaclava?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy reassured her. “And the—”

Before he could finish, Marla pointed across the
pier, at a slim, matt-black motorbike leaning against
the opposite handrail. French colours were just visible
on the fuel tank.

Jimmy nodded, the specifications of the bike flashing
through his mind automatically: MZ
125 SX… 125cc…
4-stroke
… He had to shut his eyes to stop it.

“Can you walk back to town?” he asked, opening
them after a few seconds.

Marla nodded. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Why did you need these things?”

“I’m going to make sure the French do exactly what
I tell them to do.”

Jimmy sounded so confident, but inside was a
creeping uncertainty. He only had the vaguest idea of
what his inner assassin was planning.

In short, sharp movements, he twisted the paper
clips one at a time into bizarre shapes. Watching his
hands was like watching a puppet show. Something else
was in control – but he knew that the ‘some
will not obey you just because you threaten them.
People have tried that before, you know?”

Jimmy ignored her and twisted the next paper clip
with a vicious wrench. “Where’s the radio?” he asked.

“I left it in town,” Marla replied. “With a friend who is
listening. You said you didn’t want them tracking you.”

“Good.” Jimmy hesitated for a moment and Marla
seemed to read his mind.

“There is no message,” she whispered. “I am sorry.”

Jimmy’s face didn’t flicker, but his heart gave a
twist of distress. He had hoped so hard that his
intuition was wrong and that the French were actually
going to help his family.

“But my friend will listen more, in case,” Marla added
brightly.

Jimmy avoided making eye contact. He placed a
paper clip over each ear, twisting his earlobes up and
tucking the tops of his ears down. It made his eyes
water, but he didn’t stop.

“This is for the security cameras,” he explained as he
worked. “Face recognition software reads your features
even through a mask.”

“Security cameras where?” asked Marla.

“On the
destroyer
,” said Jimmy, as if it was obvious.
“I can’t let the British Government see that I’m still alive.
Without a balaclava, I’ll have to stay out of sight of the
crew. But I’ll be safe from the cameras.”

“The British?” said Marla, confused. “What?”

“I’m going to deal with the British and the French at
the same time.” Jimmy stabbed the points of the paper
clips into his skin and bent his ears to hold them in
place. More paper clips went on his forehead – one over
each eyebrow, distorting his face. With his skin already
so damaged from his march in the desert, it hurt even
more than it would have normally. But even with the
damage they’d suffered, his hands moved with precision
and confidence.

“The British destroyer is still anchored 16 kilometres
in that direction,” he explained, pointing out to sea, into
the deep blackness of the night. “Everyone wants to trick
me into doing some mission. But this time it’s going to
be different. This time they’ll have to take me seriously.”

When he looked up Marla was horrified. “You look
like a desert cactus.” She stared at the paper clips
sticking out everywhere. Jimmy let out a short huff.

“Go back to town,” he ordered. “Is there a safe place
there I can meet you?”

“Find Coca-Cola,” said Marla. “You will be safe.”
Jimmy bent down to unlace his boots and kicked
them off.

“What are you doing now?” she asked.

“The swim will be easier without my boots.”

“What?” Marla was shocked. “Jimmy, you cannot
swim 16 kilometres there and 16 kilometres back.”

“Don’t worry,” Jimmy replied brightly. “I’ll get a lift back.”

He gave a quick nod to say goodbye and ran to the
end of the pier. He gathered pace, the boards
resounding with the drumming of his socked feet. Then
he leapt into the Atlantic.