AWOL 1 Agent Without Licence

  Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Andrew Lane

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Spy for a Day Competition

  Extract From AWOL: Last Safe Moment

  Andrew Lane

  Copyright

  ALSO BY ANDREW LANE

  Young Sherlock Holmes

  Death Cloud

  Red Leech

  Black Ice

  Fire Storm

  Snake Bite

  Knife Edge

  Stone Cold

  Night Break

  Lost Worlds

  Lost Worlds

  Shadow Creatures

  Crusoe

  Dawn of Spies

  Day of Ice

  Night of Terror

  Dedicated to Kieron Furnell, Ryan Mellor and Bradley Marshall-Smith, for allowing me to use bits of their names. You might not want to read it yourselves, guys, but you can wait until the film comes out …

  Dedicated also to the staff and boys at Summer Fields School, Oxford, where I spent a hugely enjoyable week as Writer-in-Residence and wrote Chapter 7 of this book (but not in lessons. Obviously). (And a special shout-out to Eliot. Sorry about that dedication … )

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘So, how are we going to get past security?’

  Kieron Mellor grimaced. That was going to be the really tricky part.

  ‘We could … pretend to be roadies,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Go in round the back.’

  Sam shook his head. A purple lock of hair, bright among the otherwise coal-black strands that hung down over his forehead, whipped across his eyes and he blinked. ‘That would be a dumb move,’ he said. ‘The roadies will all have security passes, and besides, they’ll all be middle-aged blokes with bald spots, ponytails, beer guts and tight black T-shirts with sweat stains under the armpits.’ He gestured at his scrawny frame. ‘I don’t know about you, but I don’t really fit that stereotype.’

  Sam’s T-shirt was actually black – he’d bought it at a band merchandise shop elsewhere in the mall – but at his size, rather than confidently hefting a 300-watt guitar amp around, he was more likely to be crushed underneath it. His tight black jeans, ripped at both knees, and the massive boots covered with rivets that he always wore didn’t scream ‘roadie’ – even though they were large enough that they could have belonged to a construction worker twice his size. Kieron wasn’t much better – the two of them could have been brothers, although Kieron was taller and filled out his T-shirt more.

  He glanced around the mall, looking for inspiration. They were in the food court on the basement level, surrounded by a cluster of metal tables and chairs. Three levels of balconies towered above them, lined with shoe shops, lingerie shops and places to buy strangely flavoured chocolates or weirdly patterned ties. The levels were linked by wide escalators that moved so slowly that you were stuck there, going up or down, for what felt like forever, with everyone watching you. The shops along the other side of the food court, opposite the counters selling coffee, pastries, pizza slices and burgers, were mainly newsagents, mobile-phone retailers or places to buy e-refills. There was, however, a laptop repair and mobile-phone unlocking unit, and that gave him an idea.

  ‘What about hacking the ticket website and putting our names on there? When we get to the front of the queue we can tell them we lost our tickets, but we’re on the list as having paid for them. They’ll have to comp us, get us inside for free.’

  Sam shook his head. ‘The names on the database will be tied to barcodes on the tickets. I can’t just invent two barcodes out of nowhere cos they’re all issued from a separate allocation, and if I copy ones that are already on the database then it’ll be obvious that they’ve already been scanned through.’

  ‘Not if we’re at the front of the queue,’ Kieron pointed out. ‘Whoever has those barcodes will be behind us, and by the time they get scanned we’ll be inside and in the mosh pit.’

  Sam opened his mouth to say something, but a sudden shout of ‘Emo scum!’ from the far side of the food court surprised him into silence. It was followed by a rain of plastic knives falling near them. ‘Why don’t you use these to cut yourselves?’

  Kieron stared across to where a group of teenagers in baggy tracksuit bottoms, polo shirts and baseball caps were staring at them challengingly. Heads turned all around the food court – mothers with kids, elderly ladies with shopping trolleys, a couple of men in work overalls, all of them glancing reflexively at the teens, then over at Kieron and Sam, with frowns on their faces. One of the elderly ladies started tutting at them.

  ‘Why don’t you –’ Sam shouted, clenching his hands on the arms of his chair and starting to lever himself out.

  Kieron grabbed a handful of Sam’s T-shirt and pulled him back. ‘Don’t give them the satisfaction.’

  Sam fell back into the chair and crossed his arms defensively over his chest, clutching onto his elbows. ‘I could take them. You think I couldn’t?’

  ‘I’m sure you could, but the mall Nazis are watching.’ Indeed, a bulky uniformed guard was already moving towards the feral teens.

  ‘Then why don’t they do something?’

  ‘It’s a free country. Apparently.’

  Sam’s hands were rubbing his forearms now. Kieron had seen the thin red scars on his white skin, but he had never raised the subject. He’d not needed to; Sam knew that he knew. If Sam wanted to talk, he would.

  ‘Free for insults and oppression directed at anybody who’s different from the norm,’ he muttered. ‘It makes me sick. I wouldn’t mind, but they can’t even tell the difference between emos and greebs.’

  Kieron glanced again at Sam’s black hair, black T-shirt and clumsy New Rock boots, and then down at himself. Apart from the fact that his T-shirt was supporting a different screamo band to Sam’s and he was a head taller than his friend, he could have caught sight of Sam in a shop window and assumed he was seeing his own reflection. Pointing out to him that greebs were setting up their own norm and their own look, just like chavs, probably wouldn’t go down too well.

  He wondered briefly what the collective term for a bunch of greebs was. ‘An isolation of greebs’, perhaps. Or maybe ‘a sadness’.

  Sam still looked gloomy and angry. Kieron looked around, trying to find something to distract his friend with, when he noticed a rack of newspapers in front of one of the newsagents. ‘We could be reporters,’ he said. ‘Doing an interview with the band.’

  ‘For the school newspaper!’ Sam shook his head. ‘We haven’t even got a school newspaper.’

  ‘We could be bloggers!’

  ‘I am a blogger,’ Sam pointed out quietly, but dangerously.

  ‘Yes, but we could be bloggers with more than thirty followers.’ Kieron saw his friend wince, and cursed his lack of subtlety, but kept going. ‘There are bloggers out there with thousands of followers. Tens of thousands. We could pretend to be one of them.’

  ‘Way to make a friend feel special,’ Sam muttered.

  ‘They’d go for it – interview before the gig and then we can watch from the side of the stage. At the very worst, we’ll be inside the hall rather than outside.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘Might work, I suppose. How do we get in touch with them?’

  ‘There’ll be a publicist. We can find them through the band’s website.’

  Sam thought for a moment. His expression suggested that he might just be buying in to the idea. ‘I could even fake a blog with lots of posts, just temporarily – take someone else’s site, copy it and put my photo on it. If the publicists don’t recognise it and haven’t met the blogger before, we’ll be OK.’

  ‘Our photos,’ Kieron pointed out quietly.

  ‘Hey, this isn’t about you!’ Sam smiled to show that it was just banter. ‘That’s actually what I meant. Worth a try, anyway.’

  ‘Who knows,’ Kieron said, ‘we might even get invited to the after-gig party.’

  He glanced surreptitiously over to where the group of teens were drifting away from the security guard like iron filings being repelled invisibly by a magnet. One of them turned to look at Kieron as he went, and raised his middle finger derisively. Kieron waved back and smiled. The boy snarled, wrinkling his lips and nose like a pit bull. It was amazingly easy to annoy them – you just had to be cheerful. They seemed to be born annoyed, and brought up in a way that just exacerbated the mood. ‘An annoyance of chavs’, then. Was that better than ‘an insult’?

  He was about to turn back to Sam and ask him, when he noticed the man at the next table. He’d been the only person not to look at the two of them when the chavs had kicked off. He had a bushy beard and wore chinos and a striped business shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A light grey jacket was slung over the back of his chair. His boots, Kieron noticed, were of a good, comfortable walking design. He’d wanted boots like that for his outdoor-education week away in Wales, but he’d had to make do with his old trainers. His mum didn’t earn that much at her job.

  The man stood out because he wasn’t looking disapprovingly either at Kieron and S
am or the others, and because he was talking to himself, chatting away as if there was someone on the other side of the table, making small gestures in the air as if he was trying to describe something to an invisible friend. He wore glasses, but they stood out because of the unfashionably thick frames and the slightly smoky look to the lenses. The man suddenly turned his head, revealing a black, curved device nestling just behind the curl of his ear – a Bluetooth earpiece.

  ‘Why’s he waving his hands around?’ Kieron asked. ‘Whoever he’s talking to can’t see him. He must know that.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just very physical.’ Sam shrugged slightly, and stared at the table. ‘Some people are. They put hands on their friends’ arms, and stuff. And hug, at random. You know.’

  ‘It makes him look like an idiot,’ Kieron said.

  ‘I wave my hands around all the time when I’m talking to you on the phone.’

  ‘Not on Skype, you don’t.’

  ‘Skype’s different.’

  Kieron glanced back at the man in the glasses. He was pausing now, head cocked slightly to one side as if he was listening. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘when you’re Skyping you zoom the camera right in on your face. You could be wearing a creepy clown costume and I wouldn’t know.’

  Kieron noticed two men heading for the table where the man with the Bluetooth earpiece was still waving his hands around. He assumed they were friends, but there was something about their body language that started alarm bells ringing in his head. They were dressed similarly to the seated man – loose chinos, Ben Sherman shirts, loose Harrington jackets – but they both had blond hair cut close to the scalp. And they were coming at the man from different directions – one angling in from behind the man’s left shoulder, one in from the right.

  And they weren’t slowing down.

  As Kieron watched in surprise, the two newcomers grabbed the man by his arms and hauled him backwards out of his chair. They must have both hit a nerve somewhere in his armpits, because the man’s face creased up in agony. His left foot kicked out, catching the table, but it didn’t fall over. One of the men reached around and pressed hard beneath their victim’s jaw. He folded up, unconscious, and they carried him away between them like two blokes supporting a friend who’d had too much to drink. His chair fell over backwards with a clatter as they dragged him off. Within a few seconds they were clear of the tables and heading for the lift to the car park. Only a few heads turned as they passed. Most people just ignored the ruckus. Typical, Kieron thought. Two greebs sitting doing nothing get tuts and dark glances, but an abduction gets nothing.

  ‘Did you –?’

  Sam’s face was the perfect picture of Manga shock: all wide eyes and gaping mouth. ‘That was a kidnapping!’ he said. ‘They just picked him up and took him!’

  ‘I know!’ Kieron glanced around, looking to see if anybody else was doing anything, but everyone was minding their own business. ‘Was it, like, a stunt of some kind? Someone filming it for YouTube, you think?’

  Sam shrugged, his eyes still wide. ‘I don’t know.’ Kieron looked around the food court, then scanned the balconies above. ‘I can’t see anyone with a camera. Not even a mobile or a tablet. If they are filming, then they’re keeping it really under wraps.’

  ‘Maybe they’re using the mall security cameras.’ He tried looking for the security Nazi, but he seemed to have vanished. Maybe he was still tailing the chavs.

  ‘That wouldn’t be very radical and underground, would it?’ Sam pointed out. ‘Getting a video feed from some corporate office.’ He glanced up at the balconies. ‘None of the cameras are pointed over here, anyway.’

  ‘Which is odd in itself.’ Kieron followed his gaze. Sam was right: all of the cameras appeared to be pointing randomly off into corners. ‘Do you think they’ve been moved?’

  ‘What, deliberately, so there was no record of that bloke being taken?’ Sam frowned. ‘It wouldn’t take much to hack the software controlling the camera motors and point them away from particular areas. Failing that, you could just knock them with a broom handle.’

  ‘Old skool – I like it.’

  The three men had bypassed the lift doors and were pushing their way through the meagre crowd to the stairwell that led down to the car-park level.

  ‘Should we tell someone?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Before we do that, I want to see what they do when they get to the car park. If they throw the man into a police car or an ambulance then we’ll ignore it; if they put him in the back of some anonymous black executive car then we’ll tell someone.’

  As Kieron sprang to his feet Sam said: ‘And if you find him badly beaten or dead in the stairwell?’

  ‘Then you’re my alibi. Wait here; I won’t be long.’

  As he moved past the table where the men had been sitting, Kieron noticed that the man’s Bluetooth earpiece and dark glasses had fallen to the floor in the brief scuffle. He bent down and scooped them up as he went past. If the man was OK then he might want them back. If he had vanished, well, the stuff might fetch a few pounds at one of the shops Kieron knew in the old High Street, no questions asked. Maybe he could afford those gig tickets for himself and Sam after all.

  The stairs to the car park were over by a 99p store where everything in the window looked like 99p was an extortionate amount to pay. Kieron pushed the door open against its springs and hesitated. What if the men were just inside, waiting to see if anyone was stupid enough to follow them? Several of the fluorescent light tubes were broken and one flickered erratically, but there was enough light for him to see that the balcony and the first flight of concrete stairs were empty. From somewhere down below he thought he could hear footsteps: hard rubber scuffing on concrete.

  He glanced back over at Sam, who gave him two thumbs up, and a smile. Emboldened, he moved into the stairwell.

  It smelled like someone had been using it as a toilet, despite the fact that the mall had some very nice toilets about ten yards away. There were also some stains on the walls that he didn’t recognise and didn’t want to think about. He headed down the stairs, trying to breathe through his mouth rather than his nose.

  The car-park levels were designated not with numbers or letters but with the names of animals. It had probably seemed like a cute idea to the planners. The first level was Antelope, with a silhouette of something that looked more like a small pony with a TV aerial on its head painted crudely onto the wall. Kieron pushed the door open and took a quick glance into the low-roofed concrete expanse. In the middle ground an SUV drove slowly between rows of parked cars, but the thugs who had grabbed Bluetooth Man couldn’t have got to a car, opened it, thrown their captive in, climbed in themselves and started it up in the few seconds they’d been out of his sight.

  He let the door close and kept going, down to the next level. The silhouette on the wall by the door looked like a hunchbacked cow, but apparently it was meant to be a buffalo. The door was just swinging closed as he got to it. He pushed it open a crack and stared through.

  The two blond-haired men were standing by a black van. Japanese – probably a Delica. Kieron’s dad had driven a Delica, which is how he recognised the silhouette. He’d driven it out of Kieron and his mum’s life three years ago, loaded up with his stuff. Funnily enough, he missed the van a lot more than he missed his dad.

  One of the crew-cut thugs had an arm around the chest of the unconscious man and was holding him up. He was looking around the car park, checking to see if anyone was showing undue interest in them. The other man was unlocking the side door of the van and sliding it back.

  Kieron felt trapped between two courses of action – either racing out into the car park to help the unconscious man or ignoring it all and walking away. Skulking there, peering through the crack between the door and its frame, seemed wrong. He ought to commit himself, one way or the other, but if he interfered then the two blond men would probably make mincemeat of him. So he stayed there, hiding and watching and cursing himself as a coward, as the men threw their captive into the back of the van, slid the door closed, checked one last time for anybody watching them, then climbed into the front and started the engine.