AWOL 1 Agent Without Licence Read online

  As the van pulled out of its parking space, Kieron pushed the door open and moved into the cross-hatched area marking out the stairs and the lifts. He watched as the van moved slowly along the row and turned at the end, past the ramp leading down to Camel, Duck and Eel, and continuing on towards the ramp leading up to Antelope and then to daylight. As it turned onto the ramp he could see its number plate clearly. He pulled a battered Sharpie from the pocket of his jeans and wrote the number down on the inside of his forearm. He wasn’t sure why, but it seemed like a good idea. Maybe the police would want to know, if this was ever reported.

  Not that there was anybody apart from him and Sam to report it. That level of the car park had been as empty of people as the one above.

  He moved back into the stairwell and began to climb the stairs back to the food court. Thoughts were racing around his head. He tried to imagine himself going into a police station and reporting this, or even just stopping a policeman in the street – if he could find one – and telling them what he had seen, but the conversation in his head hit a brick wall when the imaginary policeman checked his file and found that he’d been given several warnings for spraying graffiti on the walls of a deserted warehouse near where he lived, for loitering around the bus station, and for making prank calls. Oh, and he’d been banned from the bowling alley, along with Sam and some friends, for bouncing the balls rather than rolling them. The police wouldn’t believe a word he said now.

  He emerged on the lowest floor of the mall and glanced across to where Sam sat watching something on his mobile. He looked around for the security guard. Maybe Kieron could tell him about what had happened. The problem was that he’d banned Kieron from several audio-equipment shops up in the higher levels already, after Kieron had used the Bluetooth functionality on his own phone to play the Thomas the Tank Engine theme tune through all of the shops’ wireless speakers at full volume, a few months back. He would remember Kieron. In fact, that’s what he’d said. ‘I’ll remember you,’ had been his exact words, accompanied by a glare that would have been menacing if he hadn’t been slightly cross-eyed. No, Kieron suspected that there wouldn’t be any help coming from that direction either.

  Looking across the food court, Kieron suddenly thought about how small and vulnerable Sam looked. He took things very personally, Kieron knew, and he thought deeply about stuff. Kieron was able to shrug bad things off, pretty much, but Sam took it all to heart: internalising the pain and nursing it.

  He walked towards towards Sam. As he went, he glanced up at the security cameras that were screwed to the first balcony level. Usually they covered the entire food court with their electronic footprint apart from a small but well-known area over near the newsagents where the kids sometimes gathered to swap things they’d shoplifted, or to have a quick smoke. Now, however, he saw that all of the cameras there had been turned away too, facing sideways along the balcony wall. They’d definitely been interfered with.

  ‘What?’ he said as he walked towards his friend.

  ‘What what?’ Sam responded.

  ‘You were looking at me strangely.’

  ‘I look at everyone strangely. It’s the way my face goes.’ Sam glanced over at the door to the stairway, then back at him. ‘What happened?’

  ‘When I got down there, they were bundling that guy into a black van, then they drove off.’

  ‘You got the licence plate?’

  Instead of replying, Kieron just raised his arm.

  ‘Purple,’ Sam said approvingly. ‘I like.’ He held out his mobile. ‘I managed to get some shots of them as they were dragging him away. Might be useful.’

  Kieron sat down and took a drink from the large plastic cup on the table. Everything in the food court was plastic – the plates, the cups, the cutlery and, arguably, the food. He often wondered what the people who ran the place were scared of. It wasn’t like an aircraft: nobody was going to hijack the food court.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Sam asked. Kieron suppressed a smile. Sam was always the practical one.

  ‘Not sure. It was definitely an abduction, right? I mean, we didn’t misunderstand what was happening?’

  Sam shook his head. ‘No, it was definitely an abduction.’

  ‘And it wasn’t a couple of friends mounting a fake kidnapping as the start of a booze-fuelled stag weekend in Bulgaria?’

  Again, Sam shook his head. ‘You saw the way they incapacitated him with their thumbs in his armpits. They knew exactly where to hit to get the nerves. That goes well beyond playful physical banter.’

  ‘Right.’ Kieron thought for a moment. ‘They didn’t take his wallet and abandon him in the car park, so it’s not a mugging. It was definitely him they wanted.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s a gang thing. He trespassed on their territory, so they had to do something about it.’

  Sam looked uncertain. ‘I suppose, except that as far as I know the local gangs are pretty small, and the mall here is like neutral territory. It has to be, otherwise they’d never get their shopping done. Those guys looked seriously mean.’ He thought for a second. ‘What kind of van were they driving?’

  ‘Like something surfers would use to get down to a beach in Cornwall. Four-wheel drive, bull bars, smoked-glass windows.’

  ‘Not the kind of thing the local gangs drive. They prefer pimped-up Mondeos and Astras – usually with the entire boot taken up with a sound system. Vans aren’t their thing.’

  Sam was right. Everything about the two blond men suggested that this was something verging on a professional operation. ‘What if he was a terrorist and they were Special Forces?’

  Sam considered the suggestion for a few moments. ‘That kind-of explains what actually happened, but he didn’t look like a terrorist.’

  ‘You mean he wasn’t obviously a Muslim?’ Kieron challenged.

  Sam scowled. ‘That’s not what I meant. If anything, they looked more like the bad guys and he looked more like a good guy. They reminded me of the neo-fascists you get at rallies. Shaven heads and boots. They probably had tattoos all up their arms.’

  Kieron couldn’t help himself. ‘You’d have tattoos up your arms if you could afford it, and if your dad would let you,’ he said.

  Sam automatically bristled. ‘Yeah, but Celtic knots and Maori stuff. Not swastikas. Though actually the swastika is an ancient symbol that got adopted by the fascists. They weren’t even bright enough to come up with their own branding.

  ‘Anyway … what shall we do?’ Sam reverted to his original question. ‘There’s only one security guard, and he’s so overweight he walks around with his laces undone because he can’t bend over to tie them. What use is he going to be when a man’s been kidnapped?’

  ‘Call the police?’ said Kieron.

  ‘With our records?’ Sam pointed out.

  Kieron sighed. ‘Maybe we could send them a text, or leave an anonymous message.’

  ‘No such thing any more,’ Sam said, shaking his head. ‘The government can track any message or any text back to who sent it. Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘I know you’re paranoid,’ Kieron said.

  ‘With good reason,’ Sam protested. ‘We’re living in the most heavily observed society in the world!’

  ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Sam said. ‘The Internet’s been completely penetrated by the CIA, the NSA, MI5 and GCHQ. Half the sites that are up there on the dark web advertising guns or drugs are actually phishing sites trying to lure people in so they can be arrested.’

  A sudden thought struck Kieron. ‘Hang on – I’ve got that bloke’s earpiece and glasses. Maybe there’s something there that will tell us who he is.’

  ‘Not without his mobile,’ Sam pointed out. ‘If that earpiece really is Bluetoothed to his phone then it’s not going to tell us anything, because his phone will be out of range by now.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Oh, except that you can give labels to Bluetooth equipment. If we pair
it to one of our mobiles then it might have a name attached to it.’

  ‘Knowing our luck it’ll just say “Paul’s Phone” or “Steve’s Mobile”, which will be no use whatsoever.’ Kieron reached into his pocket and pulled out the stuff he’d scooped up from the floor.

  As Kieron put the earpiece and the glasses on the table, Sam leaned forward. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I take it back – that’s not a standard Bluetooth earpiece.’ He slid it across the metal surface of the table, avoiding the sticky lemonade and cola stains that had survived the last cleaning. ‘I guess it might be next-gen Bluetooth, or maybe WiFi Direct.’ He popped the earpiece apart with his thumb. ‘The battery isn’t a standard make either.’ He looked at it more closely. ‘In fact, it’s not a battery at all – it’s a miniature fuel cell.’ He gave a low whistle. ‘That’s clever.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Kieron said. He took the earpiece from Sam and examined it. The way the thing was sculpted, and the soft silicone feel of it in his hand, made him revise his estimate of the price upward by a significant chunk. This wasn’t your bog-standard supermarket own- brand kit – this was something special. High-end audio.

  Curious, he picked up the glasses and looked them over. No obvious trademark or logo, but again they felt expensive. On a whim, he slipped them on and looked at Sam with a mock-serious expression on his face. ‘And in other news tonight …’ he said.

  Sam laughed.

  It occurred to him that he could see Sam’s face without blurring or distortion. ‘Hang on – these things are plain glass!’

  ‘Photochromic sunglasses?’ Sam asked, ‘Just clear at the moment because they’re out of the sun?’

  He was about to answer when glowing words appeared at the bottom of his visual field.

  User detected. Powering up from sleep mode.

  ‘There’s something –’ he started to say, but then he was looking at an image of a different world in a rectangular box that seemed to be projected in the air about ten feet in front of him. It was like looking at a widescreen TV, except that he could see Sam through it.

  And on the screen, in the image, he could see a bright blue sky and a white arched building. Oh, and a hand, holding a glass of cola, positioned exactly as if it was his hand. Except that it wasn’t. It was a girl’s hand, with a thin gold watch on the wrist and gold rings on the fingers.

  ‘Bradley,’ a female voice said, ‘stop feeding your face. I need your help.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Bradley – stop feeding your face. I need your help.’

  Bex Wilson reached up and tapped the button on the side of her sunglasses, wondering if she’d accidentally managed to turn the volume down while brushing her hair out of her eyes. Or maybe a trickle of sweat had got into the electronics and short-circuited something important. She wouldn’t be surprised – the kit was meant to be military-grade, hardened against environmental and climatic conditions, but accidents happened, and the heat here in Mumbai was more oppressive than anything she had ever experienced. It was like something you’d feel if you opened an oven door after you’d been baking a potato for an hour. The humidity was just as bad: so much moisture hung in the air that her sweat had nowhere to go, so it just stayed on her skin. What with the heat and the humidity combined, Bex felt as if the entire atmosphere, in a column from where she stood all the way up to the edge of space, was pressing down just on her.

  Glancing around the open space outside the hotel, she wondered why nobody else seemed to be feeling it. Or maybe they were, but they just weren’t showing their discomfort. Maybe, once she got used to it, she would be all right. She wasn’t putting any money on it though.

  She was sitting on a stone bench on the edge of an area of paved ground with a can of cola in her hand. Behind her the ornate and impressive Victorian edifice of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel rose up, where rich tourists stayed in glorious, air-conditioned luxury. Ahead of her sat a massive square basalt building with an arch in the centre that Bradley had told her was called the Gateway of India, and beyond the arch the grey water of Mumbai Harbour rolled greasily.

  The sky above her was grey as well – dark clouds swelling like dirty sheets hanging from washing lines high above.

  Bradley had warned her about that water. Don’t swim in it, he’d said. Don’t even touch it. Apparently it’s like raw sewage.

  That’s why she had Bradley on the end of a virtual line – to provide information like that. And, of course, to get her out of trouble.

  The area in front of the arch heaved with people. Some of them were tourists from abroad wearing backpacks and holding cameras or guidebooks. Some of them were tourists from elsewhere in India, wearing saris or baggy linen shirts and trousers, and with two, three or four kids running around them. Some of them were locals selling cans of drink, cheap sunglasses, postcards and maps. One of them – Bex – was an undercover intelligence agent. And every single one of them seemed to be ignoring the fact that it was so hot that they could all have cooked eggs on the paving slabs.

  Bex had spent a lot of time in America, from Death Valley to Florida, and she’d thought she knew all about hot weather. This, however, was nothing like anything she had ever felt. This, as her gaming friends would say, was a level up from her previous experiences.

  Speaking of gaming friends, she tapped her earpiece again in frustration. As far as anyone looking was concerned, she was just making a call. Which, in effect, she was. ‘Bradley? Are you there? What’s going on?’ She didn’t make any attempt to disguise the fact that she was talking to nobody – everyone in the world these days knew what Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were. It wasn’t suspicious.

  For a moment she heard nothing but the seashore-hiss of background static, but then a tentative voice said: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Bradley?’ she asked. It didn’t sound like him.

  ‘No, my name’s Kieron.’

  She frowned. She and Bradley had never noticed any interference with their communications before, but she wasn’t that experienced with the technology and she supposed there had to be a first time for everything. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said politely, ‘I think we’ve got a crossed line. Can you cancel your call and try again? I’ll do the same.’

  ‘Wait,’ the voice in her ear said urgently, ‘I need to ask you something. Are you looking at a massive arch thing made of stone?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ she said.

  ‘And have you got a can of cola in your hand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not a game, or something?’

  ‘No. Are you saying you can see the arch and the can too?’

  This was wrong. Somehow this Kieron had accessed her encrypted communications with Bradley. Maybe he had even hacked it. Instinctively her hands rose to her sunglasses. Making it look like she was just pushing them back on her nose, she covered up the miniature cameras on each side, just in front of the hinges where the arms met the lenses.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘it’s gone dark! What happened?’

  So he was seeing what she was seeing. This was wrong. She had to tell her bosses in SIS-TERR – the Secret Intelligence Service’s Terrorist Technology-Enhanced Remote Reinforcement team – but first she had to find out what had happened to Bradley. Maybe he was trying to get through to her on another channel and finding it blocked. She hoped so, anyway.

  She lowered her hands before it looked too odd.

  ‘Are you wearing something like those cameras you see on cyclists’ helmets?’ the kid asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ she replied noncommittally. ‘Look, kid, you need to disconnect now, OK?’ She tried to pitch her voice like an air stewardess telling a passenger that they can’t have another glass of wine. ‘It’s a protected link. You could get into trouble.’

  ‘I think trouble’s already happened,’ the voice said. He sounded young. Maybe just a kid. Not that she was much past her twentieth birthday herself, but she felt older. She’d lived through a lot in the past couple of years,
even if most of it had been training and simulations.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This bloke – he got taken away. He left his stuff behind. I’m using it now to talk to you.’

  Bex felt as if a bucket of cold water had been poured all over her. It was like stepping into an ice-cold shower. For a second she shivered, but then the Mumbai climate enveloped her again like a warm, wet duvet. ‘What bloke?’ she asked urgently. ‘What did he – I mean, what does he look like, the man you’re talking about?’

  A pause on the other end, then the kid – Kieron – said: ‘Early thirties, long blond hair and a beard. I’d say he was wearing thick glasses, but I’m wearing them now and they’re just plain glass. Not prescription lenses at all. Dressed like someone’s hipster dad – chinos and an ironed shirt.’

  ‘You’ve got his glasses and his earpiece?’ Bex asked urgently.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’

  Oh, this was getting worse and worse.

  ‘Where are you exactly, right now?’

  ‘I’m in the basement of a shopping mall in Newcastle.’

  Newcastle. She felt a sick feeling welling up in her stomach. That was where Bradley had been operating from. There was some connection between her mission in India and that city, but it wasn’t clear what the link was. Bradley’s job had been to investigate that link when he wasn’t providing Bex with support.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

  ‘He was just sitting here, when two men came over and grabbed him. They dragged him away, down to the car park. They threw him into a van and drove away.’ His voice rose in tone while he spoke, as if he was reliving the events and feeling shocked all over again. Bex had been trained in listening unemotionally to people’s voices and picking up undercurrents of emotion and meaning, but now she was feeling shock along with this Kieron.

  ‘And he just left his kit on the table?’ She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  ‘It fell off.’ He sounded defensive. ‘I just picked it up and, you know, kind of tried it on, and realised I could see, like, a high-def 3D image projected on the lenses somehow so I can see what’s happening here but I can see what’s happening there as well. That’s some really sick technology.’