AWOL 2 Read online

  ‘That depends,’ Tara said unsmilingly. ‘What did you leave behind?’

  ‘A cufflink? My mobile?’ He shifted on the inflatable ball. It squeaked loudly. ‘My self-respect?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure you had any self-respect when you first came in here,’ she said. ‘I told Todd you were too young and that this was some kind of set-up, but he didn’t believe me. He was too enthralled by the wonderful product you were trying to get him to invest in.’

  ‘If it helps,’ Kieron said, ‘I do think it’ll actually work.’ His mind raced, trying to find some way out of this situation.

  ‘I’ll be sure to tell Todd that. He can take the idea off your dead body and exploit it himself.’ Finally she smiled. ‘He’ll probably want to name it after you. He’s such a sentimentalist. I’ll advise him not to though. Why celebrate the people you’ve had to crush in the course of business? They should rot in obscurity. Safer that way.’

  ‘And does that apply to the thirty-five people of Eastern European heritage who died of heart attacks in Israel while working for the Goldfinch Institute?’ Kieron asked. He didn’t expect an honest answer, but he wanted to distract and delay Tara and the guards for a few precious moments.

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve watched too many movies,’ she said. ‘You think I’m just going to explain everything to you. I’m not.’

  ‘But you’re not going to kill me,’ Kieron pointed out. Just past Tara he could see the lifts. The light above one of them had lit up, indicating that someone was using it. Maybe they were travelling to a lower floor, or maybe they were coming to the fifth floor, where Kieron, Tara and the guards were located. Maybe it was Todd Zanderbergen, arriving to gloat, or maybe it was someone else. He didn’t know, but there was a chance it might provide a distraction. Just the faintest chance.

  ‘Why am I not going to kill you?’ Tara seemed genuinely interested in his answer.

  ‘Because if you were, you’d have done it already. You’re keeping me alive so that you can question me – find out why I’m here and who I’m working for.’

  ‘You know the thing about non-lethal weapons?’ Tara asked. Before Kieron could answer, she answered her own questions: ‘They hurt. Some of them hurt a lot. Take the microwave skin heater you saw earlier. That one really hurts. You’ll tell me what I want to know, and you’ll do it very quickly; I have no doubt about that, no doubt at all.’

  Kieron saw, beyond the armed guards, the lift doors slide silently open. Someone stepped out – a cleaner, holding what looked like some high-tech version of a vacuum cleaner. He obviously wasn’t expecting the lights to be on. Blinking, he spotted the little group.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I’ll come back.’

  Tara and the two guards spun around, surprised. As they did so, Kieron stood up, grabbed the ball he’d been sitting on and threw it at the guard to Tara’s left. Before it even hit he’d scooped up the wireless trackpad and skimmed it like a Frisbee towards the other guard. The ball hit the first man and bounced, unbalancing him, as the trackpad caught the second guard in the throat. He started choking.

  No time to run to the lifts. Where could he go?

  He did the last thing Tara and the guards expected. Instead of running for the lifts and stairwell, he ran in the other direction – towards Todd’s office, in the centre of the building.

  He got there just as he heard Tara behind him saying, ‘He’s trapped himself, the fool! Get him!’

  He dashed across the office and scooped up the microwave skin heater from the glass display table. He wouldn’t have thought to use it, except for Tara’s mention of the weapon. Non-lethal, but extremely painful.

  As he turned he saw the two guards rushing into the office.

  He hefted the weapon, pointed it at them and pressed the trigger.

  It only occurred to him then that it might not have had a power pack inside, or, worse, it could have been a model rather than the real thing, but his fears were unfounded. He knew that because the moment he activated it the two guards stopped as if they’d run into a brick wall. Their eyes widened and they started slapping at their clothes as if they were on fire.

  Kieron stepped towards them, still firing. The weapon was easy to operate – almost instinctive. Good design, he thought. They backed away rapidly through the doorway. One man tried to go left while the other one went right, but Kieron herded them with the invisible beam of energy so that they both went in the same direction – towards Tara.

  One of the guards tried to make a break for it, running away to one side, but Kieron used the weapon to make a wall of pain ahead of him. He quickly doubled back towards his friend.

  It was like using a hosepipe to move sheep around, Kieron thought, and started to giggle.

  The edge of the beam caught Tara, and she squealed.

  Bit by bit, Kieron moved the two guards and the Head of Security to one side, giving him a clear run to the stairwell. He thought their skin was starting to go red, although that might just have been the pain, the exertion and the embarrassment of having a teenager shepherding them around. One of the guards tried to pull his gun, but Kieron had already spotted a dial near where his other hand supported the barrel of the weapon. He turned the dial, and the guard started screaming. When the man took his hand off the butt of his gun, Kieron turned the dial down again.

  Tara’s expression combined pain and fury in equal measure.

  Kieron backed through the fire door into the stairwell. The moment the door closed, he sprinted down the stairs, still carrying the weapon. He had to get to the bottom before they did. He guessed Tara and one of the guards would take the lift while the other guard followed him down the stairs.

  He passed the doors to the fourth, third and second storeys, expecting at each one to have someone jump through and try to grab him. Nobody did. He almost missed the exit due to the fact that Americans had first floors where English people had ground floors. He’d run past it and down the steps to the basement, wasting precious seconds, before he realised and went back.

  The first floor housed the reception lobby. Instead of heading straight out through the doors Kieron went in the other direction, seeking a back exit. He assumed that Tara would have already notified the guard on the main gate to stop him, so he had to either find another way past the security fence or hide out somewhere and come up with a way to alert Bex to his situation.

  A door next to the lifts led along a corridor to exactly what he wanted – another way in and out of the building.

  And outside the door, in a covered parking area surrounded by blue glass walls and roof and with a tunnel leading to the outside, stood four Harley-Davidsons. Todd Zanderbergen’s toys.

  Kieron had ridden a motorbike twice before, both times on waste ground near where he lived in Newcastle. He vaguely knew how. He also thought he knew, from computer games rather than real life, how to hot-wire one. Quickly he put the microwave weapon on the floor, straddled one of the motorcycles and followed the three wires from the handlebars to a plastic firing cap. He pulled the firing cap apart and was left holding a piece of plastic with three square holes in it, with the wires leading away into the engine. He needed a loose piece of wire now. Glancing around, he cursed. This place was just too tidy. Trust him to try to steal a bike from a man with control issues.

  But he did have the visitors’ instructions Judith had given him earlier. They were held together by a metal staple. He pulled the folded bits of paper from his jacket and tore the pages away until he was just holding the staple. He straightened it, then bent it again into a curve.

  And he rammed it into the two holes in the firing cap that would make a connected circuit.

  As his thumb touched the ignition button on the handlebars something swished past his head and hit a glass wall with a loud splat!

  Reflexively he turned his head to look. A football-sized mass of blue goo slowly slid down the glass, but it was drying as he watched, hardening into a distorted teardrop-shape, its
surface turning into a crazy-paving of hard skin with still-liquid goo oozing between the cracks like lava.

  He glanced sideways. Tara Gallagher stood in the tunnel that led out, to freedom. She held a massive bazooka-like gun in both hands: a tubular barrel large enough to fire tennis balls, with a chunky stock and a tube leading to a tank strapped to her back. Kieron didn’t know where she’d got it from, but he knew what it was. He’d seen it demonstrated on the Goldfinch Institute video that he’d been forced to sit through in their conference room that morning. It fired a ball of quick-hardening plastic material. The intention was to incapacitate rioters bearing weapons; stop them from committing further acts of violence.

  And they were using it against him.

  Tara smiled wolfishly. ‘Stick around, kid,’ she said, and fired again.

  Kieron jabbed his thumb on the ignition button. The Harley roared into life and he gripped the handlebars and twisted the accelerator hard. As the bike jerked and then leaped forward he saw a blue projectile emerge from the barrel of the weapon, trailing a tail behind it and looking like some kind of mutant tadpole from a horror film. The weapon bucked so hard in Tara’s hand that the projectile shot past Kieron’s head and splattered on the blue glass ceiling of the tunnel. It spread out into a thin layer from which blue tentacles started to descend before they set hard into icicle-like spikes. As he careened beneath them he heard them snapping like tiny bells.

  The Harley seemed to buck beneath him like a living animal, and then he was speeding through the tunnel. It felt as if the motorcycle was in charge, not him. It was all he could do to stay in the saddle. The fact that he was half reclining in a kind of dentist’s chair position didn’t help.

  The roar of the Harley’s engine echoed back from the glass walls of the tunnel, filling the space with sound. Moments later he was out into the night, careering along between slanted walls of blue glass. Glancing left he saw another rider on another motorcycle, this one on some kind of platform a metre or so above him. He seemed to be leaning over, towards Kieron. His teeth were clenched hard and his hands were clamped on the motorcycle’s handlebars with professional-looking skill. And then he realised. This wasn’t another rider; this was him, reflected in the slanted glass. He looked so competent, so aware of what he was doing, that Kieron felt a sudden burst of confidence. If his reflection could do it, so could he.

  Looking right he noticed another reflection. Three Kierons, three bikes, all moving together like a formation team. All working as one.

  Up ahead the two glass walls he was speeding between ended at a crossroads where four buildings met. Kieron cursed. There’d been a map of the Institute in the reception lobby earlier, but like a fool he hadn’t thought to memorise it. Yes, the ARCC glasses had faithfully recorded the image, but he wasn’t going to stop now and check for directions. He had to make a decision.

  He slowed, and slewed the bike so that when it got to the junction he’d be facing left. Small stones sprayed up from beneath his tyres. He skidded out past the edge of the building and found himself staring straight down another glass canyon, heading who knew where.

  A football-sized blue mass hit the building by his shoulder.

  Tara.

  The goo splattered like a dropped bowl of porridge, sending tendrils in all directions. As he watched, it started to harden.

  He twisted the accelerator and headed down this new channel. His engine noise, magnified, echoed back from the glass, deafening him.

  Another junction up ahead – this one with just one alternative route, off to his right. Turn, or keep going?

  Turning would take a precious few seconds but it would disguise his course. If he kept on riding straight then Tara, when she came around the last corner, would see him and be able to report where he was heading, maybe set up a roadblock. He slowed, twisted the handlebars right and leaned with the curve. The Harley obeyed his instructions perfectly. He had exerted dominance.

  He slid into the junction, ready to accelerate, but something was wrong. For a moment he thought that he was looking directly at his own reflection in a glass wall, but that wasn’t it. This wall must be straight, not slanted, because the reflection wasn’t tilted.

  And it was still coming at him, even though he’d slowed for the turn.

  It wasn’t a reflection: it was another Harley. One of the guards must have taken another of Todd’s bikes. Or been told to take it by Tara.

  Kieron couldn’t haul his bike back in time to keep going down the path he’d just come off. The bike was too heavy. He only had one choice.

  He gunned the throttle again and accelerated straight at the oncoming bike.

  The guard wasn’t wearing a helmet. His features had contorted into a snarl, but Kieron wasn’t sure if it was the speed of the air against his face that had forced it into that expression or whether he was just really, really angry.

  The two bikes headed for each other at catastrophic speed.

  At the last second, Kieron twisted his handlebars. His bike veered left and mounted the slanted glass wall. Like a trick rider, he was defying gravity, riding on the glass rather than the ground. It seemed strong enough to take the weight – for now. As the two Harleys passed each other in opposite directions, everything seemed to be in slow motion, and Kieron realised they were so close he could have reached out and tweaked the other rider’s ear. And then they’d passed each other and time returned to normal speed. Kieron steered right and his bike obediently came back to flat earth again.

  The other rider wasn’t so lucky. Kieron heard a banshee screech of brakes, then a crash! so loud that it overpowered even the roar of the two engines. The bike had run straight into the wall, and the glass hadn’t been strong enough to withstand this direct assault. As Kieron drove away he heard a distant whoomph! as petrol spilling from the tank ignited.

  Now that there was nothing in his way Kieron could see that the channel between the buildings ahead of him ended not in another featureless glass wall but in a patch of open ground and a section of chain-link fence. It was a glimpse of freedom. Yes, he still had the two fences to negotiate, but that was a problem he could worry about in, oh, say, thirty seconds’ time. His task now was to get there, alive and in one piece. One problem at a time.

  The ends of the two buildings forming his channel were just three bike lengths ahead when a door in the right-hand wall abruptly opened and Tara Gallagher stepped out. She was breathing hard, having run through several buildings to get there, and she held the goo gun in her hands. She aimed it and fired – not at Kieron, but at the front wheel of his Harley. The sticky foam hit the spinning spokes and splattered in all directions, but some of it had stuck. As Kieron zoomed past and saw Tara swing the weapon like a club at his head, he also noticed that his bike was suddenly moving much slower than it should have been. It was like driving through thick mud.

  Before Tara could fire at his back and incapacitate him, Kieron slammed on the brakes. The front wheels locked and he threw his weight forward, standing up on the foot supports. Momentum caused the rear end of the bike to rise up in the air, shielding Kieron from Tara’s next shot but propelling him over the handlebars. For a long moment he hung in mid-air, but then gravity prevailed and he hit the ground, rolling over and over, feeling the skin on his hands and his back scraping against small stones.

  To anyone standing outside, by the fence, it would have seemed as if Kieron had suddenly been fired out of the gap between the buildings like a bullet from a gun.

  He lost count of the number of times he rolled, but one thought dominated his mind: the fence he was heading towards was electrified! If he hit it, he would die!

  He twisted as he rolled, so that his feet were ahead of him, and then he dug his heels into the ground, slowing him, but not enough. The wires were just two metres away from him now. Desperately he splayed his hands and clawed his fingers into the earth.

  He stopped with his face just inches from the deadly wire.

  Exhausted, bat
tered and mentally frozen, he took a breath to steady himself. All he wanted to do was lie down and rest, but something kept him going. It was the knowledge that he still had a job to do.

  He suddenly realised that the tarmacked area where Bex had dropped him earlier was just off to his right, beyond the two fences. It was empty of cars. The security turnstiles and the cabin by the gates were there too, but the cabin’s door swung open and he could see nobody inside. The guard had probably been called out to help in the chase. If Kieron could reach the turnstiles, he might be able to get through – if the ARCC glasses with Judith’s iris image stored in their memory hadn’t been broken in the crash and if the turnstiles hadn’t been locked in a security crackdown.

  His right hand pulled Bex’s glasses from his jacket pocket and his legs twitched as his subconscious tried to persuade the rest of him to run towards the turnstiles, but in his conscious mind he knew that the game was up. Tara was clever: she would have locked the site down by now.

  Which meant that Kieron needed to do something else.

  He glanced over his shoulder. It had only been a few seconds since the crash, although it seemed much longer. Nobody else had emerged from the gap between the buildings, but they would, any moment now, he had no doubt.

  Quickly checking that he’d pulled the correct pair out, and he wasn’t about to throw the ones he thought of as ‘his’ set, Kieron flung the ARCC glasses with all his strength. They sailed above the first fence, but Kieron had always been terrible at cricket and rounders at school, and his lack of muscles and co-ordination showed. The glasses reached the top of their arc somewhere between the two fences and began their inevitable descent. He wasn’t sure if they would make it over the second fence. If they didn’t, they would be trapped between them.

  ‘So, Ryan,’ came Tara’s voice from behind him, ‘Todd will not be happy with you.’

  Kieron turned. ‘I take it the Lethal Insomnia trip is off?’ he asked, loudly enough to disguise the sound of the glasses landing. He thought he heard them hit tarmac rather than sand, but he wasn’t sure.