AWOL 2 Read online

  They had proved themselves in action though. She had to admit that. They were brave, and they were resourceful. And they were her last, best hope of exposing the traitor within MI6’s SIS-TERR organisation.

  Kieron woke up two hours later. His entire body language changed as he moved from the relaxation of sleep to the sudden realisation that he had his head on a girl’s shoulder, from totally unselfconscious to very tense and awkward in a few seconds. Bex quietly leaned back and closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep as well. Kieron surreptitiously moved his head off her shoulder and straightened up. She left it a few minutes, then ostentatiously yawned and said, ‘How long was I asleep for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

  She found herself wondering if he had a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend: either was fine. He and Sam weren’t together, obviously – they were just good friends – but he never talked about seeing anyone else. Girls made him nervous though: that was obvious by the way he wouldn’t look directly at Bex when he was talking to her if he could help it, and the way sometimes, if he wasn’t talking to her, he’d surreptitiously look over at her, checking her out.

  She hoped he wasn’t developing a crush on her. That would be awkward.

  There were movies on the in-flight entertainment system. Bex had thought Kieron and Sam might want to settle down and watch them, but actually they were bland things – comedies or dramas that had nothing in them that kids would find disturbing. Kieron had apparently downloaded a whole load of horror films onto his games tablet, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood to watch them. That was probably just as well – there was a family seated in the row behind them, and Bex didn’t want the young kids looking through the gaps between the seats and seeing the kind of horrible stuff that teenagers these days seemed to like watching. The in-flight entertainment system did, however, have a channel where you could watch the aircraft’s progress on a crude map, and Kieron seemed to become almost hypnotised for a while by the way the aeroplane icon slowly inched its way across the Atlantic, leaving a dotted line behind it.

  ‘Why’s the pilot taking such a long route?’ Sam asked, leaning over and glancing at the screen.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Bex asked.

  Sam traced the path of the aircraft – a curve that led up from London, passed over the tip of Iceland, peaked over Greenland, then descended to hit the eastern coast of Canada. ‘He’s going miles out of his way,’ Sam pointed out. ‘He could have gone in a straight line. It would have been a lot quicker.’

  Bex stared at him. ‘Do you do geography at school?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said defensively. ‘Why?’

  ‘The Earth is a sphere, right? A ball. You’ve seen globes with all the continents marked on?’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘But the map on that screen is flat, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yee-es.’ Sam had an expression on his face that suggested he was expecting some kind of trick or punchline.

  ‘Well, the curved surface of the Earth has to be distorted to make it look flat on the map. If you plotted the aircraft’s course on an actual globe, you’d find it was actually the shortest route between England and America. It’s not a completely straight line – that would take it right through the Earth’s crust – but it’s the closest thing you can get on the surface of a sphere. It’s called a Great Circle.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sam shrugged. ‘Who knew?’

  ‘Well,’ Bex said carefully, ‘pretty much everyone, I thought.’

  They changed aircraft at Washington Dulles Airport, after a landing so gentle it was almost undetectable. It wasn’t Bex’s favourite airport, not by any means. Too impersonal, no decent shops and no decent restaurants. You’d think that the main international airport of the capital city of the most important nation in the world would try to be a little more impressive, but no.

  It impressed Kieron and Sam, though, if only because they recognised the control tower from the Bruce Willis action film Die Hard 2. Which they referred to as ‘that old action movie’, making Bex feel really old.

  The second leg, from Dulles to Albuquerque, was on a smaller jet with two seats on either side of a central aisle, rather than the 3-4-3 configuration on the aircraft that had bought them in to Dulles. Kieron and Sam both had window seats, and because this aeroplane flew lower for much of the journey, they spent most of the time with their faces pressed against the Plexiglas, staring at the terrain passing underneath.

  Half an hour out from Albuquerque, Kieron invited Bex to look out of his window. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ he breathed.

  Bex gazed out. They were passing over a broken landscape of vaguely reddish rocks – either the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness in Colorado or the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico, she thought, remembering the research she’d done on the journey before setting out. In the unlikely event that the aircraft might have to make an emergency landing, it was always useful to know where you might be. Not that it had ever happened to her, but there could always be a first time. The thing was to make sure that it wasn’t the last – at least not for the wrong reasons.

  Below the aircraft, away to one side , she saw what looked like a massive discontinuity in the ground: a rough line where everything on one side was several hundred metres above everything on the other. Along the cliff-edge she could see an apparently endless line of huge wind turbines, spinning slowly. The low sun cast their shadows long across the landscape.

  ‘Impressive,’ she said, and she meant it.

  ‘This is the best trip I’ve ever been on,’ Kieron murmured. ‘Whatever happens, thank you for agreeing to bring us.’

  Albuquerque airport shared its runways with the US Air Force’s Kirtland Air Force Base, so there were several sleek fighter jets on the tarmac when they landed. Predictably, Kieron and Sam spent their time comparing notes and trying to identify them. Boys, Bex thought with a surprising but not unwelcome twinge of affection. It didn’t matter that they were both emos with a massive disdain for governments and the military: show them some actual hardware and they’d be talking about maximum airspeed and armament. It was the same trading-card mentality that led to things like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! Bradley would have been the same.

  The airport buildings – well, the civilian ones anyway – were cool and spacious, influenced largely by the artwork and the dwellings of the local Navajo people. It didn’t look like England, and it didn’t smell like England, and the boys were entranced. They in turn attracted a lot of strange glances from the Americans retrieving their luggage at the same time. The hairstyles and the clothes that helped Sam and Kieron blend in in Newcastle town centre – at least, to an extent – made them stand out among the shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps that seemed to be de rigueur for the typical American teenager. Bex mentally cursed. She should have anticipated that. Drawing attention was something she tried to avoid whenever possible, but these two were about as subtle as a pair of pandas in a supermarket. She had to get them into something more suitable, and quickly.

  ‘Are we going to the hotel?’ Kieron asked as they walked out of the terminal towards the area where the rental cars were parked. The air was warm and smelled of dust and aircraft fuel. The sky was an incredibly clear blue. ‘Only Sam thought –’

  ‘We’re going to the mall,’ she said, cutting him off. ‘I need to get you into the kind of clothes that a teenage technical genius would wear. Something smart but casual. Sam too.’

  ‘Why me?’ Sam asked, affronted.

  ‘Just in case you’re seen together,’ Bex said, thinking quickly. ‘We don’t want anything that looks too odd, like an emo and a tech entrepreneur together.’

  ‘We’re not emos,’ Kieron grumbled. ‘We’re greebs.’

  ‘Whatever. You’re going undercover – remember?’

  Albuquerque was a smallish city, and the airport was close to the centre. It took less than twenty minutes to drive along wide roads and past low, one- or two-storey buildin
gs, in which Mexican restaurants and car dealerships seemed to alternate, to a mall that was actually just across the road from their hotel. Bex parked the hire car out in the open and started to lead the way towards the shops, but she realised after a few moments that neither Kieron nor Sam were following. She turned, to find them gazing in wonder into the distance. She followed their gaze, trying to work out what it was that had paralysed them.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked eventually, giving up.

  ‘Mountains,’ Kieron said. ‘Look.’

  She looked. There were, indeed, mountains, rising up from the edge of town.

  ‘Yes, the Sandia Mountains,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve never seen mountains before,’ Sam explained, still staring. ‘We’ve got things called mountains in England, but they’re really just hills. These are real mountains.’

  Bex shrugged. ‘Seen one mountain, seen them all,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  The mall was buttressed at each end with a large department store. Bex took the boys inside the mall through the food court and then along rows of smaller shops towards the nearest, found the men’s department, then selected appropriate clothes for each of them – casual shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps, like the teens in the airport had been wearing, and slightly more formal lightweight jackets, cotton shirts and pressed jeans for any business dealings.

  ‘I’m not wearing this stuff,’ Sam protested.

  ‘Then you can go home,’ Bex said firmly. ‘I can exchange tickets and send you right back. You’ve done the journey out – you can find your own way back with no trouble, I’m sure.’

  ‘But –’ Sam held up the garish shorts – ‘no greeb would be seen dead in stuff like this!’

  ‘You’re not a greeb while you’re here,’ Bex pointed out in a low voice. ‘You’re undercover, remember? Pretending to be something else. Somebody else. And the main point about being undercover is that you don’t want to be found dead.’ She took a deep breath. ‘If you don’t like the clothes, you’re really not going to like the next bit.’

  ‘What next bit?’ Kieron asked suspiciously.

  ‘The bit where the two of you get your hair cut.’ Before their stunned expressions could turn into howls of protest, she said quickly, ‘I spotted a barber’s shop across the car park. You can keep it long, but we’ve got to find a way to make sure that it fits in with the clothes. Long but neat, in other words. And those piercings are going to have to come out.’

  Fortunately they were too shocked to actually say a word.

  They both just closed their eyes for a few moments, and nodded.

  ‘I think we both knew it was going to come to this,’ Kieron said, his expression pained.

  Sam nodded. ‘Undercover opportunities for greebs are fairly limited. We talked about this before we left. If we’ve got to conform to go undercover, then so be it. Bring it on. Dress us up however you want.’

  ‘Didn’t Courtney and her friends used to do that to you when you were little?’ Kieron asked. ‘I’m sure she said there are photographs of you in a dress that they’d forced you to wear.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘Don’t have to force me, these days,’ he said off-handedly. ‘Come on – let’s get this over with.’

  The barber was an elderly black man who’d had his shop since before the mall was built. ‘They wanted me to sell this ol’ place,’ he told Bex as he cut a wincing Kieron’s hair, ‘but I told them no. So they changed their plans and built around me – left me here on the edge of the car park. Which is a good place to be. The ladies, they shop, an’ their husbands come in here for a trim or a shave an’ a chat. You guys ain’t from around here, are you? That accent – Australian, ain’t it?’

  Afterwards she led the two shell-shocked teens back past the car to the mall again. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get some ice cream. I saw a place in the food court selling flavours I didn’t even know existed.’

  After Kieron had demolished his black-walnut-and-honey ice-cream sundae and Sam had finished his lavender and green tea with shortbread crumble – both covered with several different varieties of chocolate and caramel sauce – Bex shepherded them both back to the car. It had been sitting in direct sunlight for several hours, and Bex felt sweat breaking out all over her body the moment she slid into the driver’s seat. She quickly clicked the air conditioning on, and drove to the hotel.

  She’d booked into a mid-range Marriott – one of several in the city. She had one room; the boys were in one down the corridor. ‘Unpack and rest for an hour or so,’ she told them. ‘Then we’ll get an early dinner and plan on what we’re going to do next.’

  Dinner was steak and pasta in the hotel’s restaurant. The ice cream didn’t appear to have dented either Kieron or Sam’s appetites.

  ‘Do you think Lethal Insomnia are staying in this hotel?’ Sam asked, gazing around at what, to him, was probably a very upmarket place to eat. Bex had to admit that he looked good in his new clothes, and with his hair shortened and tidied. Kieron too. They ‘scrubbed up well’, as her mother would have put it.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t notice any TVs thrown out of top-floor windows or expensive cars floating in the swimming pool.’ At their blank looks she added, ‘It’s a rock ’n’ roll thing. From before you were born. Right – let’s get down to business.’ She glanced at Kieron. ‘We need to get you into the Goldfinch Institute. You’ve got something to show them – this idea for a non-lethal weapon that you and Sam have come up with – but that’s for once you’re in there. The first step is to actually get through the door.’

  ‘I’ve got an idea about that too,’ Kieron said. He glanced around, much like Sam had done a few moments before, but with less awe and more nervousness. ‘Do you think we might be being – you know – bugged? Listened to?’

  Bex shook her head. ‘Nobody knows we’re here. I’ve made sure of that. What’s your idea?’

  ‘I use the ARCC kit to hack into the Goldfinch Institute computers. They’ll have all kinds of firewalls protecting the internal, top-secret stuff, but their outward-facing admin server is likely to be only lightly protected. It has to be, otherwise it wouldn’t let emails in and out, allow them to synchronise calendars and so on. So I’ll sneakily create an appointment in the calendar of the guy in charge …’

  ‘Todd Zanderbergen,’ Bex said.

  ‘Yeah, him. I then turn up at the main reception desk expecting to see him. His PA will be surprised, because she didn’t think he had any appointments, but there’s unquestionably one in there.’

  ‘Won’t they be able to check that it’s only just been added?’ Bex asked.

  Kieron shook his head. ‘I can fake the timestamp so it looks like it was created a month ago. They’ll assume it didn’t show up until the last minute because of some kind of IT problem. So – I go in and talk to him. Then what do I do? Ask about these dead scientists and people who’d been working for him? That’s going to make him suspicious, isn’t it?’

  ‘OK – two things. Firstly, if you’re supposed to be trying to go into business with him you’re entitled to ask about anything that concerns you. It’s called “Due Diligence” – you thoroughly check a company out before you sign a contract. Say you’ve noticed that he’s been recruiting an unusually large number of staff recently. Ask him what happened – did lots of people resign? Did he fire people?’

  ‘We know why he’s recruiting,’ Sam pointed out. ‘Some of his staff have died.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bex explained patiently, ‘but when you’re interrogating someone, you never let on that you know stuff about them. You try to look innocent – see if they tell you what you already know or try to lie.’

  ‘Is that what I’m doing?’ Kieron looked impressed and slightly daunted.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Bex said reassuringly. ‘I’m your backup. I’ll be with you every step of the way.’

  After dinner they went to Bex’s room. Kieron slipped the ARCC glasses on, ready t
o go to work.

  ‘Hang on,’ Bex said, holding up her hand. ‘Make sure you don’t use your own name when you make the appointment. Use the name Ryan Allen.’

  ‘That’s me, is it?’ Kieron asked. ‘I was wondering if I had an alter ego, like Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne.’

  ‘More like Barry Allen,’ Sam muttered. At Bex’s questioning glance he added: ‘He’s the Flash’s alter ego. He’s a geek.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, understanding the reference but pretending she didn’t, just for effect.

  Kieron frowned, the movement making the ARCC glasses ride up on his nose. ‘But what happens if they spot the appointment early? I mean, Todd Zanderbergen’s PA is probably going to go through his diary when she gets in in the morning. She’ll see it, and she might worry about the fact that she hadn’t prepared for it. Isn’t she likely to be suspicious?’

  Bex shook her head. ‘If she’s any good – and I can’t imagine Zanderbergen employing anyone who isn’t – then she’ll prepare a briefing pack for her boss on anyone coming in for a meeting – who they are, what they want, where they come from, maybe even some suggestions as to what the benefits to the Goldfinch Institute might be of making a deal with them.’

  ‘So she’ll go on the Internet and check me out,’ Kieron said with an edge of worry in his voice. ‘And she’ll find out that there’s no information about me.’

  ‘Oh, but there is.’ Bex smiled. ‘Before we left, Bradley put together a complete dossier on Ryan Allen. I’m going to spend the next couple of hours seeding it around the Internet – not obviously, but scattered around in databases and stuff. There’ll be information out there on where Ryan Allen went to school, what his local paper wrote about him when he won a science prize, all kinds of little things. Nothing obvious – there’s quite a few people who don’t have a digital presence at all – but enough to satisfy their curiosity.’

  Kieron nodded. ‘You’ve done this before,’ he observed.

  ‘It’s what I do. These days most of our jobs are as much about the digital information that’s out there as they are about disguises and adventures. More even.’