Target (11 page)

J
IMMY BACKED TOWARDS
the stairs, dragging Eva by the neck. The security guards held their positions, but trained their machine guns on Jimmy’s head. At last, Jimmy reached the first step. He backed up it, keeping Eva directly between him and the guards. It was only four steps before the staircase reached a landing. If he made it that far, Jimmy would be able to run. But Miss Bennett wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

“Shoot them both,” she stated calmly. The gunmen adjusted their aim. Then a blood-curdling yell made them hesitate.

“No!” It was Mitchell. He leapt up the corridor, kicking out with both legs in mid-air. His feet slammed into two of the guards, knocking them over. Jimmy took his chance to escape. It wasn’t much, but it was a head start.

“Leave him to me,” Mitchell shouted, sprinting forwards.

Jimmy raced up the stairs, Eva close behind him. “NJ7 has taken over the building,” she panted.

“Thanks, I worked that out,” Jimmy replied.

“But Felix’s parents were never here.”

“What?”

“It was a trap.” Jimmy couldn’t let the shock of this revelation stop his legs driving him upwards. “Chris and Saffron were captured a few days ago when they came here,” Eva went on, panting more and more. “They’re in the basement, being interrogated.”

They tore past another landing. Jimmy didn’t dare look down. Even with the thick carpet, he could hear Mitchell pounding after them.

“So where
are
Felix’s parents?” Jimmy blurted out.

“Somewhere called Fort Einsmoor. But I don’t know where that is.” The name meant nothing to Jimmy, but it was a start. He kept running up and up. Eva lagged further behind with every step.

“Have you heard anything about Stovorsky?” Jimmy demanded.

“Yes. He was arrested yesterday. And Jimmy…” Eva stopped running, out of breath. She whispered after Jimmy, “They have your mother.”

The words reached Jimmy just as Eva dropped out of view. They stabbed into him, but he couldn’t let them slow him down. Then he heard Eva again. This time her voice was more distant and her tone had changed.

“Oh, Mitchell, I was so scared,” she sobbed. “Thank you for saving me.”

At the top floor, Jimmy burst through a metal fire escape. The wind buffeted him, knocking one of the pieces of soap off his face. He didn’t care about that now. He could already hear the roar of the helicopters coming to kill him. He dashed across the roof and vaulted on to the top of the next building, landing with a roll. A few seconds later he heard someone do exactly the same behind him. Without looking round he knew who it had to be.

Jimmy’s muscles burned with power, propelling him forward at a pace he’d never experienced before on foot. The helicopters were overhead now. Instinctively, Jimmy scooped up a handful of gravel. In his hands it could be lethal.
Please don’t kill anybody,
Jimmy begged himself.
Nobody has to die.
But his programming was pumping through him and he knew that Mitchell probably wasn’t armed.

Jimmy sprang across to the next building, this time a jump of nearly five metres over a drop of fifty. Just before he landed, he hurled out a stone. The power in his shoulder lent it the momentum of a bullet. Suddenly, a high-pressure burst of steam erupted into the sky. Jimmy hadn’t aimed at Mitchell, or even at the helicopters above him, but at one of the many pipes that snaked over the rooftops.

As he ran, he let fly with more stones. The pipes he
hit blasted steam and water high into the air, making it impossible for the helicopters to see him. They couldn’t shoot because they wouldn’t know what they were shooting at. Even if they had thermal imagery, the heat from the steam would mask Jimmy.

He climbed out over the side of the building, listening for the helicopter rotors fading. Jimmy didn’t dare look to see how close Mitchell was. He climbed out over the side of the building until only his fingertips clung to the rooftop. His body swayed in the wind. Between him and the ground were six storeys.

He felt the tiny vibrations of Mitchell pounding closer. No time to think. He let go. The building lurched away from him. His stomach leapt. But before he even had the chance to take in a gulp of air, he halted his fall by catching hold of the top-floor window ledge. Then in one athletic heave, he flipped himself up and over, through the window. He landed in a shower of glass in an empty office.

Without wasting a second he tore off his coat and wrapped it round the desk chair. He heaved it out of the window then lifted the desk into the shattered hole to make it look as if it had been boarded up.

It was the chair that Mitchell saw hitting the pavement when he reached the edge of the roof, and in the poor light, that was what he took to be the body of Jimmy Coates. He peered down at it then climbed over the edge of the building. He had already assumed Jimmy was dead once – this time he was going to check.

In very little time Mitchell had climbed down to the street. Jimmy, however, had taken the stairs to the ground floor. When Mitchell kicked over the bent limbs of the chair, he wasn’t to know that, on the other side of the building, Jimmy was bursting out of the office and into the street.

Jimmy twisted back to the safehouse through all the side roads, staying in the darkest corners. The sooner he was off the streets, the better. He quickly tapped in the door code and slipped into the safehouse building, sighing with relief.

When he reached his room he bent down and removed a hair from across the crack in the door. He had secured it there with saliva when he went out. The fact that it was still there, intact, assured him that nobody had entered while he was gone.

Inside, Jimmy went straight to the laptop. One thing had been on his mind more than anything else as he had been running through London: Fort Einsmoor. There was still a risk involved in connecting to the Internet, but he decided it was definitely worth it. He knelt on the floor and set the computer on the bed. But however he searched, he found nothing.

Jimmy knew he shouldn’t have been disappointed – did he expect to find a top-secret detention facility with ease? But he was. He shut off the laptop, defeated, and
slammed his hand on to the mattress. At that moment, he was overcome with despair. His hands trembled. A lump rose in his throat. His mind refused to accept what he knew to be true – that the only possible next step was to go to NJ7 Headquarters. That was the only place where he would find out about Fort Einsmoor.

Jimmy buried his head in the bed sheets. He was sick with worry for his friends. Not just Felix’s parents, but Viggo and Saffron, locked up at the French Embassy. And then there was his mother. He imagined all the things she might have gone through. He tried to work out rationally whether she would be OK. But the more he tried, the more he realised he didn’t know. The mother he had known had been an act, a job to make it look as if the Coates’s were a regular family. Then as soon as the real woman had begun to emerge, Jimmy had been separated from her again.

Focus,
he told himself.
One mission at a time.
All Felix’s parents had done was try to help him and now they were locked up. They weren’t equipped to cope with that. His top priority should be finding and freeing them. He felt the crushing weight of responsibility. His muscles were like bricks, they were so tense. Even to see the faces of Felix and Georgie would have been a comfort. Were they on their way?

Then, without wanting to, Jimmy pictured his father’s face. If he was going back to NJ7, Ian Coates was likely to be there. Jimmy’s heart seemed to soften, still
imbued with love for his father. But the same man had chosen loyalty to the Government over his family.
How could he support Hollingdale?
Jimmy still couldn’t believe it.
If he sees me again maybe he’ll change his mind.
Jimmy longed for that chance, but at the same time he dreaded what might happen.

It took only half an hour for Jimmy to be out on the streets again with a new disguise. He ‘borrowed’ another overcoat from the hallway of the safehouse building and trudged through the shadows, careful to make sure that his gait matched his appearance. Police patrol cars did pass, but they had no reason to stop the small Chinese gentleman hurrying through the darkness. Helicopters criss-crossed the sky, peppering London with pillars of light. They would search all night; it was as if Jimmy Coates had disappeared.

At each corner Jimmy trusted his sense of direction, following his first instinct every time. It felt as if his programming was pulling him to Westminster, desperate to return to its home. All Jimmy needed was a way in.

When he had rescued his parents from NJ7 with Christopher Viggo, they had gone in via an entrance at Holborn Underground Station. Jimmy knew that route was impassable now – the disused section of tunnel connecting the Underground system to NJ7 had
flooded. But Jimmy remembered that Viggo’s first idea had been to enter through a manhole. Apparently, not all of them led to the drains.

Jimmy rushed to the first one he saw. He heaved it open. Straightaway the stench of the sewer smacked him in the face. He dropped the cast-iron seal back in its place. Now he knew exactly what to look for. All he needed was a manhole that didn’t smell.

He walked on, into the heart of Westminster, and found another of the iron covers. A light rain had formed a puddle that reflected Jimmy’s face as he stared into it. He kicked away the water and strained to lift the cover. The sound of iron scraping against concrete echoed off the buildings. Jimmy put his face to the opening. No smell. He lowered himself into the concrete tube, balancing on the metal bars that passed for steps down the side. When he was low enough he dragged the cover back across the hole. It was an incredible weight. Jimmy was breathless before his journey underground had even started.

The shaft dropped for several metres below him, but there was light at the bottom.
A real drain wouldn’t look like this,
Jimmy thought. He felt round the rim of the manhole for any wiring – if he’d set off an alarm he wanted to know about it – but there was only the cold of the concrete.

Steadily and silently he made his way down. The deeper he climbed, the more his insides hummed. He
had to be ready for action. No disguise in the world could keep him alive down here. At the bottom Jimmy paused to listen. There were no footsteps, but that wasn’t what he was listening for. Then he heard it – the thin fizz of a security camera scanning the corridor. He waited there, learning the rhythm of its movement, deciphering which way its eye was trained.

Jimmy picked his moment perfectly. With split-second timing he swung out of the shaft. He clasped his knees round the steel girder that ran along the ceiling of the tunnel. As the camera turned, Jimmy twisted, keeping pace with it so he was always just out of its range. He was in. As long as he stayed on the ceiling and kept moving, he would avoid the surveillance cameras.

All the blood rushed to his head and the muscles in his stomach wrenched tight, but Jimmy held on to the girder. He crawled along upside-down as fast as he could. The tunnels were deathly quiet. Only occasional voices echoed through to Jimmy.

The first place he thought to look was Dr Higgins’s office. He remembered the computer technicians who had been working in there when Jimmy had first been briefed by NJ7. If he could somehow get access to one of those computers, surely everything he needed to know about Fort Einsmoor would be on it.

As he approached, he heard exactly what he was afraid of – the tapping of fingers on a computer keyboard. Somebody was still working in there. But
Jimmy didn’t have time to wait for the room to be empty.

Straining all his muscles once more, he pulled himself round the corner. Here, the corridor widened out, becoming an office space, and the ceiling was a little higher. Below him was a bank of computers, but he couldn’t get to work until he had made sure the surveillance cameras weren’t going to pick him up.

He crawled towards one, sweat dripping down the side of his face. He did all he could to breathe silently. The effort of holding himself upside down for so long was beginning to tell. Then, just as he came close, Jimmy heard footsteps tapping closer, and the mumbling of a faint conversation. Two people were approaching.
Walk past,
Jimmy urged them in his head. But they didn’t. Together, two men marched into the office. The first was Dr Higgins. He stood directly below Jimmy, who looked down on his thin hair and protruding nose. If Jimmy so much as breathed too loud, he was done for.

Next to Dr Higgins was a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase. It wasn’t the black suit of an NJ7 agent though; it was a faded blue business suit. And when Jimmy saw who it was, his fingers nearly lost their grip. His head spun. It was Ian Coates, his father.

J
IMMY CLUNG TO
the steel girder, his arms vibrating with the strain, sweat dripping into his eyes. A part of him longed to give up. He was suddenly tired of hanging upside-down, tired of disguises, tired of the whole affair. He almost expected his father to look up at him, smile and reveal that it had all been a game. What if he did look up? Would Jimmy’s own father betray him again? Have him killed? Jimmy refused to believe it. And yet he had no idea what his father
would
do.

“Has Ares taken his pills?” Dr Higgins’s voice was distinctive. It was an old voice, but the authority of experience gave it a richness.

“Yes, but he still refuses to leave his bunker.” “That puts you in a powerful position, doesn’t it, Ian?” Dr Higgins busied himself at his desk. Jimmy noticed for the first time that it was covered by a sheet of black tarpaulin. Dr Higgins pulled it back with a flourish to reveal the body of a young man.

The open eyes stared up at Jimmy. He looked away, horrified. But when he looked back, he realised that whoever the man was, he wasn’t dead. Though his skin was pale, his chest rose and fell with his breath. There was no life in his eyes though. He was nothing but a living corpse.

“Who’s this poor soul?” asked Jimmy’s father as Dr Higgins wheeled a large silver contraption into position over the young man’s head.

“Ian Coates, meet Leonard Glenthorne. Mitchell’s brother,” the doctor announced with a hideous grin.

“You’re keeping him alive?”

“Of course. He wasn’t badly injured. It was necessary only to make Mitchell
think
he’d killed his brother. And so long as he makes no trouble we’ll keep it that way.” Dr Higgins lowered a metal nozzle until it was directly over Lenny’s left eye. “Meanwhile, I can carry out valuable tests using some of our latest technology.”

With the flick of a switch, a blue laser shot out of the nozzle directly into Lenny’s pupil. The body convulsed, but it could have been the vibrations from the laser machine. Jimmy didn’t want to look any closer.

“So now that you’re the PM’s right hand man, so to speak,” Dr Higgins continued, still engrossed in his experiment, “what has he sent you here to ask me?”

Ian Coates paced the room as if unwilling to answer. “You won’t like it, Kasimit,” he began.

“I never do, but it keeps me busy.” Dr Higgins smirked at his own response.

“The Prime Minister is worried.”

“Worried? He’s paranoid. Not leaving his bunker? Sending you to carry out even his most basic duties?” Jimmy’s mind whirled – since when was his own father the Prime Minister’s most trusted man? Jimmy felt a pain where in a different world there might have been pride.

Ian Coates ignored Dr Higgins’s outburst and carried on. He was clearly agitated about something. “When Memnon Sauvage left NJ7, he passed top-secret British technology to a French agency known as ZAF-1.”

“Rubbish,” scoffed Dr Higgins. “Memnon was my closest friend. He wasn’t interested in selling secrets to the French. He just didn’t want Hollingdale taking the credit for his genius.”

“Is that why he sabotaged the second chip?”

Jimmy was startled. He remembered what his mother had told him about each assassin being programmed by a computer chip. Surely the second chip meant
him,
Jimmy Coates? He didn’t know what to be more upset about – the suggestion that he had been sabotaged or the fact that his father hadn’t referred to him by name.

Dr Higgins looked up from his laser experiment. He stared at Jimmy’s father. “Sabotage?
He
was the true genius behind the assassin technology. He loved the project too much to damage it. All he did was add his own flourishes. Typically French ones, I might add – like
fencing.” Dr Higgins was reminiscing now, with a fondness in his eyes. “Whoever heard of giving a twenty-first century assassin the ability to fence? But that was typical of Memnon. I wonder what he’s up to now, eh?”

Jimmy couldn’t help shuddering. They were talking about him. And he had been sabotaged. He started piecing everything together in his head. Eleven years ago, a French doctor, working for NJ7, had grown frustrated at Hollingdale taking all the credit, so he’d tinkered with the project they were working on at the time – Jimmy Coates, assassin. Jimmy remembered fencing with Viggo and also Higgins’s surprise when he found out. Was it the same French touch that gave him the ability to speak the language? And what about his cooking? Were all his extra skills the product of a proud scientist showing off?

“I’m not here to argue about whether Dr Sauvage was an eccentric rogue or a traitor,” snapped Ian Coates. “I need you to stop everything you’re working on and decipher these.” He opened his briefcase and threw down the contents on to the body of Lenny Glenthorne: an orange folder marked ZAF-1 and a clear zip-lock bag containing a bloodstained orange flash drive.

“What’s this?” asked Dr Higgins, mystified.

“Memnon Sauvage’s files. You were his closest friend. You’re the only man who could possibly crack his codes.”

Dr Higgins seemed to move in slow motion now. “Where did you get these?” His voice trembled. “Whose blood is this?”

“I’m sorry, Kasimit.” Ian Coates cleared his throat. “We’ve had these for eleven years.”

“Memnon is…dead?” gasped the doctor. “He’s been dead for eleven years and nobody told me?” His eyes bulged and he seemed to age visibly. His temples were flushed purple. ‘You’re telling me the French killed him because he wouldn’t give away Britain’s secrets?”

“No, Kasimit,” replied Ian Coates, calmer now that the truth was at last emerging, “/ killed him because he
did
give away our secrets.” Jimmy’s father said no more. Only the hum of the laser accompanied his footsteps as he turned and strode away down the corridor. Dr Higgins didn’t move. He just stared at the folder and the flash drive.

Jimmy could only do the same. He hadn’t known Dr Memnon Sauvage. He had never even heard the name before, but suddenly he wished more than anything else that the man was still alive. Because his death made Jimmy’s father a murderer. Ian Coates had just confessed and Jimmy had heard every word, spoken all too calmly.

Rage began to simmer inside him. His father had not only worked for the British Secret Services, he’d killed for them. And he talked about it now as if it had been the most natural thing in the world. How many times had he done it? How many people had Jimmy’s father killed just because they stood in the way of Ares Hollingdale’s rise to power?

A tear trickled across Jimmy’s cheek. He was so confused, he didn’t even notice when it hung from his earlobe.
Eleven years,
he thought.
Has my father been a killer all my life?

The tear fell. Like the first raindrop of a storm, it splashed on to the concrete floor. Jimmy froze. He realised what had happened. Dr Higgins looked at the spot it had hit. There was a single speck of salt water on the floor. If the doctor looked up…

Jimmy’s chest rumbled and something itched in his throat. Then he felt his mouth open against his own will. A noise pushed out from his chest. “Doctor,” he called out, but it wasn’t Jimmy’s voice – it was his father’s. Somehow, Jimmy had managed to imitate perfectly the voice of Ian Coates and throw it across the room to make it sound as if it came from somewhere else. The sound distracted Dr Higgins.

“The files, doctor,” Jimmy shouted, in the same voice. “What is ZAF-1 ?”

Jimmy was as bewildered as Dr Higgins. It felt like his own father was inside him, shouting to get out. The doctor half turned to where he thought the voice was coming from – the opposite direction from where Jimmy was hanging. Then he snatched up the flash drive and threw it to the floor. With an efficient stab of his heel, he crushed it and stamped on its remains with venom.

For all the confusion and anger Jimmy felt towards his father, it was tempered by a sliver of pity for Dr
Higgins – he suddenly looked every bit the frail old man, betrayed by the country he had served so loyally.

When the flash drive was crunched into a thousand pieces, Dr Higgins turned to the file marked ZAF-1. He held it in his hands for a moment, trembling. He never opened it. Instead, he redirected the laser from Lenny Glenthorne’s eye on to the file and turned a dial on the machine. The file erupted into flames. Dr Higgins held it there until every scrap had disintegrated to ash. Then he screamed with pain and pulled his hand away. Tears cascaded through the wrinkles on his face. He ran from the room, clutching his hand in distress.

Jimmy was too shocked to do anything at first. He couldn’t rid his mind of the image of Dr Higgins burning his hand on the laser. There was ash all over Lenny Glenthorne’s face now, though he wasn’t conscious of it of course. That was all that remained of ZAF-1 – NJ7’s knowledge of it at least.

Jimmy eventually gathered his thoughts once more. He had come here for one reason: to find Fort Einsmoor. But he couldn’t just drop to the floor and set to work at a computer. First, he carefully loosened one of the screws that fixed the surveillance camera to the iron girder. The camera was still working, of course, but now it wasn’t attached to the mechanism that revolved it. It could no longer sweep the room. Instead, it remained focused only on the far corner.

Jimmy jumped to the floor, confident that he wasn’t
being observed, and sat at a desk. He immediately felt something on his leg. He jumped up. His heart nearly stopped. Then a black cat padded out from under the desk. Jimmy breathed again.

He didn’t waste any more time. He placed his fingers on the keyboard and let his programming guide him round the operating system. His hands were sore from holding his body weight to the ceiling for so long, but that didn’t slow him down. He didn’t know how long he had before Dr Higgins came back to his office.

This computer had access to Milnet – the military version of the Internet – so Jimmy tracked down Fort Einsmoor very easily. There were schematics of the compound and details of the security surrounding it. It was perfect. There was even information on Neil and Olivia Muzbeke, including the false names under which they were being held. Jimmy studied for as long as he dared, committing to memory as much as he could.

Then he heard footsteps in the hall. He took one last look at the location of Fort Einsmoor on the map, closed the page and climbed back up the wall. Five minutes later he was above ground, once more transformed into an insignificant Chinese man shuffling through London’s night-time streets.