Survival (22 page)

JUMMY COATES POWER

Jimmy’s world is
about to go BOOM!

SNEAK PREVIEW…

The metal shutter slammed down on to the concrete,
cutting off the last sliver of daylight and sealing Jimmy
in the car park. Strip lights cast soft shadows around
the rows of cars, lined up between huge supporting
pillars. Jimmy stood up and dusted himself off, but the
first thing he saw made him feel like his knees were
going to give way.

Next to the entrance was the booth for a security
attendant. A cup of tea was perched on the ledge inside,
still steaming. But the only thing left of the attendant’s
head was an explosion of bone and brains on the back
wall. Jimmy lurched to the side. He looked away and
tried to breathe, but every lungful of air was thick with
the stench of fresh blood. He tried to cry out, but the
noise he made was only a desperate gasp.

He staggered back from the booth, clutching at his
mouth and nose, as if he could pull out the taste of what
he’d seen. After a second that seemed like a lifetime, his
insides swirled with the force of his programming. It
gushed up through his body, blasting away the shock,
but it was too late to stop Jimmy retching up the measly
contents of his stomach.

A part of him wanted to curl up in a corner and
catch his breath, but he knew that wasn’t an option. He
pulled himself up to his full height and rushed back to
the booth. This time when he looked his eyes ignored
the blood, even though it was still pumping from the
security attendant’s neck in a thick dark fountain. He
scanned the area, searching for a phone or walkie-talkie.
Both were there. Both had been smashed
beyond usability – presumably by the same man who
had blasted the attendant’s head off.

I saw him
, Jimmy realised, the nausea returning.
He
drove past me on that moped. I could have stopped him
.
He felt faint, but his programming seemed to crank up a
gear. It was like a belt fastening a notch tighter inside his
skin, pulling his thoughts into calm, emotionless order.

First he found the van. That wasn’t hard – it was
parked in the central row, right next to one of the pillars.
The rear doors were locked, but Jimmy jabbed his elbow
into the catch and pulled them open.

The vehicle was completely full of crates, stacked up
three high and covered in a thick grey blanket. Jimmy
pulled back one corner and nearly threw up again. It was
even worse than he’d expected.

When he’d first smelled the nitroglycerin, he’d assumed
that one or two crates might contain volatile bomb-making
equipment of some kind. But here were dozens of crates,
and every single one of them was packed with slim glass
tubes of a clear, jelly-like solid, all connected by a network
of black wires. The whole van was one giant bomb.

Jimmy wanted to run straightaway to warn people.
He thought of all the residents in the tower above him,
and the children in the playground alongside the building.
They all had to evacuate. But Jimmy’s feet wouldn’t
move. Instead he remained rooted to the spot while his
eyes darted over the contraption before him. He traced
the lines of wire as if following the map of a labyrinth,
examining the piles of crates for precious seconds. How
long did he have before the whole thing blew up?

Come on
, Jimmy told himself, feeling the sweat
crawling down his neck.
There’s no way you can defuse
a bomb
. There was no ticking clock, no red digits
showing him a countdown. There certainly wasn’t
anything that looked like an ‘off’ switch, and all of the
wires were the same colour – black.

Jimmy thought his eyes were going to bulge out of his
head, they were flitting around so fast without blinking.
He noticed the condensation on the glass tubes.
Of
course
.
Nitro freezes at thirteen degrees
. The chemical
was usually a liquid, but Jimmy realised it had been
cooled into a solid to make it easier to transport. At the
same time, he knew that as nitroglycerin thawed, it
became even more unstable.

In Jimmy’s imagination, the piles of crates changed
shape. Some of them even became transparent. In a
flash, he could see exactly how this bomb was supposed
to work.

Against his will, he felt a rush of pleasure. Something
inside him was impressed by the artful construction of
the bomb – even thrilled. It was built in such a way that
only a single detonator was required. That would shoot
a charge through the wires, setting off a chain reaction
as it raised the temperature of each tube of
nitroglycerin, melting them in a specific order. That
intricately organised relay would multiply the size of the
explosion a hundred times.

The beauty of it was that the bomb was virtually
sabotage-proof. The detonator was nowhere to be seen
– presumably hidden at the very centre of the pile of
crates. Then Jimmy noticed tiny gold rings round the
connections between the wires and the glass tubes.
A
second trigger mechanism
, he realised. Any attempt to
disconnect the wires or get to the detonator would set
off the chain reaction early. That left no way of stopping
it, and no way of predicting when it would explode. Even
with the expertise of an assassin inside him, for all
Jimmy knew this bomb could blow up at any moment.

Joe Craig studied Philosophy at Cambridge University,
then became a songwriter. Within a year, however, his
love of stories had taken over and he was writing the
first novel in the
Jimmy Coates
series. It was published
in 2005. He is now a full-time author and likes to keep
in touch with his readers through his website
www.joecraig.co.uk.

When he’s not writing he’s visiting schools, playing
the piano, inventing snacks, playing football, coaching
cricket, reading or watching a movie.

He lives in London.

1
. Jimmy Coates: Killer

2. Jimmy Coates: Target

3
. Jimmy Coates: Revenge

4. Jimmy Coates: Sabotage

TEAM UP WITH

JIMMY COATES ON MYSPACE!

WWW.MYSPACE.COM/JIMMYCOATES

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