AWOL 2 Read online

  ‘That was impressive,’ Sam said, brushing dust from his eyes.

  She took the access road more slowly. It was rutted and untended, looking like it headed to a farm rather than a research institute. It was all in keeping with the way Zanderbergen had disguised his place in the USA. He was apparently a man of habit.

  Something came into view over the horizon: a forest of antennas, followed by the top of a cluster of buildings clad in red glass.

  When the bottom of the buildings came into sight, along with a familiar-looking double fence and security cabin, she pulled over and stopped the car.

  She concentrated on what was happening down at the security gate. A black limousine had just passed through the gap, and the metal plates were sliding back up to block the way.

  ‘We’re too late,’ she said dejectedly. ‘They’ve gone inside.’ Although what she had planned to do if they had caught up with the limousine, she realised she hadn’t exactly thought through.

  ‘Then we go inside,’ Sam said firmly. ‘If that’s what we have to do to get him back, that’s what we do.’

  ‘Hang on a second.’ Bex watched as a driverless golf cart made its way from the nearest red glass building down towards where the limousine had parked. The driver of the limousine got out and opened the doors, one after the other. Todd Zanderbergen stepped out of one side and Tara Gallagher from the other. Moments later, Kieron joined them.

  He was alive! She felt her heart leap.

  Kieron reached into his jacket pocket and pulled his ARCC glasses out. Casually he slipped them on and looked around. Bex grinned. That kid reacted instinctively in a way that some agents took years to learn. He must be scared, probably terrified, but he was still thinking about the mission, and keeping his head.

  ‘Check the link to Kieron’s glasses,’ Bex murmured to Sam. ‘He’s just put them on.’

  As Sam made gestures in the air, Bex watched as Kieron said something to Tara. Todd said something to her as well, and she walked over to the security cabin. Moments later she came back holding something in her hand. She waved it at Kieron, then said something to Todd. He answered, and Tara appeared to be typing something into the device she held.

  ‘That’s strange,’ Sam muttered.

  ‘What’s strange?’

  ‘The glasses – for a few seconds there I could see what Kieron was seeing, but all I’m getting now is static.’

  ‘Static?’

  ‘It’s like they’re being jammed.’

  Bex sighed. ‘Tara’s holding some kind of electronic gadget. It must have detected the signal and countered it. We’re back to square one.’ She sank down to the ground, the adrenalin and anxiety of the past hours catching up with her.

  Then a sudden thought occurred to her, a shaft of light in the darkness that was threatening to engulf her. ‘Sam – slide that suitcase over.’

  ‘We’re going in armed?’ Sam sounded simultaneously scared and enthralled.

  ‘No.’ She opened the case. Ignoring the two Glock handguns, she focused on what she recognised immediately as a disassembled M24 sniper rifle. The various parts – bolt, assembly rod, operating rod, trigger block and firing assembly, stock and barrel nestled in foam rubber, along with a Leupold Ultra M3A 10×40mm fixed-power scope.

  It took her fifty-five seconds to assemble the whole thing.

  ‘What are you going to do with that?’ Sam asked nervously. ‘Kill someone?’

  Bex aimed the gun at the three people inside the wire fences.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Kieron stared bleakly out at the Israeli landscape beyond the security fence. This might be the last bit of the real world he ever saw. Shame it was mainly rocks, dust and scrappy little plants. If he was going to die on an espionage mission – as was looking increasingly likely – then why couldn’t it be in Hawaii?

  A flash of light at the top of a nearby hill caught his attention. The sun glinting off something? Maybe a bit of broken glass. Nothing that was going to help save his life, unfortunately.

  ‘Come on,’ Tara said, shoving Kieron from behind. ‘You’ve got an appointment with agonising pain. We wouldn’t want you to be late.’

  Kieron turned to glare at her. It was the only way he had of showing resistance; well, that and snarky comments. He was just about to speak when he saw another flash of light over Todd’s shoulder.

  Todd and Tara were both facing forward, towards the buildings. They couldn’t see the flashes.

  A tiny bud of hope began to unfurl in his heart.

  ‘Dammit!’ Tara snapped. There was a sudden crack! and a clatter as something hard hit the ground. Kieron turned, and saw that the jamming unit she had been holding was now on the ground a few steps away from her. She looked confused.

  ‘You clumsy idiot,’ Todd shouted. ‘Check that the thing’s OK!’

  ‘It slipped from my fingers,’ Tara said as she walked over and bent to retrieve it. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘What happened was that you were paying too much attention to pushing the kid around and not enough to keeping hold of the jammer. Is it broken?’

  Tara had picked the jammer up and was staring at it bleakly. ‘Smashed. Must have hit a stone when it fell. Sorry, boss.’

  Looking at it, Kieron could see that the screen had broken, and a corner was torn off. He glanced back at the hilltop where he’d seen the flashes of light. Coincidence? Perhaps not.

  ‘Do we have another one? Tell me we have another one.’

  Tara’s expression gave Kieron hope that there weren’t any spares.

  ‘I think so,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I’ll get someone to check.’

  ‘Why is it that I’m surrounded by incompetents?’ Todd snarled. ‘Seriously, someone – tell me.’

  ‘Because you hire them,’ Kieron pointed out helpfully.

  For a moment Todd looked as if he was going to backhand Kieron, but instead he pushed him towards the golf cart.

  ‘That,’ a voice in Kieron’s ear said, ‘was possibly the most difficult shot I’ve ever had to take.’

  Bex!

  The bud of hope in Kieron’s heart suddenly bloomed. Yes, he was still a prisoner, and, yes, he was inside a double-layered security fence while his friends were outside, but at least he had friends, and they were nearer than he’d dared to hope. They’d followed him!

  ‘So, what’s the plan?’ he asked as they sat in the golf cart and it started to move off. He made it look like he was speaking to Todd and Tara, but really he was asking Bex.

  ‘Not sure yet,’ Bex said. ‘We’re kind of playing this by ear. The first step was breaking that jammer and getting in contact with you. I can’t read lips at this range, but it didn’t look as if they spotted anything suspicious – did they? Answer me if you can, but don’t act suspiciously.’

  ‘You do talk a lot, don’t you?’ Todd said as they headed into a red glass canyon between two of the buildings of the Goldfinch Institute. ‘That’s an annoying habit generally, but it’ll come in useful when we’re interrogating you.’

  ‘No,’ Kieron said firmly, answering Bex but making it sound like he was defiantly rejecting Todd’s threatening words.

  ‘That’s good,’ Bex said. ‘I was using a silencer and I tried to clip the corner to knock it out of her hand. A fraction lower and there’d be a bullet hole through it, and that would have given the game away straight away.’ She paused. ‘Sam’s fine, by the way, and he’s with me. And we’re going to do everything we can to get you out safely. Don’t worry Kieron – we’re here for you.’

  ‘Do whatever you need to,’ Kieron said.

  ‘We will,’ Bex and Todd said at the same time, and Kieron felt a shiver run up his spine. This was going to be tricky: communicating with Bex while making it look like he was making comments about what was going on. He’d been getting used to it, but now his life was at stake.

  ‘We need to get you away from them before they can get that replacement jammer Tara mentioned,’ Bex sa
id in his ear as the golf cart turned a corner and continued driving between the red glass buildings. ‘And I can’t shoot it out of her hand again once you’re inside. We haven’t got long to think of something. The problem is, I haven’t got access to the plans of the Institute’s buildings here in Tel Aviv, so I can’t guide you. They’ll be on the internal server, not the external one.’

  ‘This place,’ Kieron said, turning to Todd, ‘it looks just like the one in Albuquerque, except it’s a different colour. What is it – are you obsessive-compulsive or something? Do you like having everything exactly the same? Is that why you only hire redheads?’

  Todd just snorted, as if the question was too trivial to answer, but in Kieron’s ear Bex murmured, ‘Good question, well presented. I’ll call up the plans of the Albuquerque complex – you downloaded them from the internal server when you were in there, didn’t you? Let’s assume for the moment that this facility is the same as that one.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kieron went on, then added, this time to Todd, ‘that must be it. Obsessive-compulsive.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I cut the labels out of any clothes I buy, because I don’t like the feeling that I’m being identified as part of some big company’s advertising strategy. I like to be anonymous.’

  ‘If you don’t shut up,’ Todd said wearily, ‘I’ll get Tara to cut off the little finger of your left hand. She carries a special device, you know, just to do that. She modified it from one of those things businessmen use to slice the ends off cigars.’

  They were approaching one of the red glass buildings now, and ahead of the driverless golf cart Kieron saw a sliding glass door opening to let them in.

  ‘Right,’ Bex said, ‘I’ve got the plans up. From what I can see, the footprint is identical, but what’s inside might be different.’

  The golf cart swept in through the doors. The space inside was huge: occupying most of the building as far as Kieron could see. The cart was driving down a curved corridor made of plain glass, like a tunnel that ran from one side of the building to a position in the middle. The glass was so clean that it almost seemed as though it wasn’t there. Only that slight distortion when Kieron tried to look through it at an angle, rather than straight on, gave away its presence. It also gave away its thickness: that glass had to be nearly three centimetres thick!

  That wasn’t the most impressive thing, however. Kieron stared, amazed, at what was on his left and right, beyond the glass. Satellites! Real satellites, designed to go into orbit around the Earth! They ranged from the size of a small car to the size of a coach. Some of them were unique, but others had similar siblings, differentiated only by numbers painted on their sides. Each one had shiny blue solar panels that unfolded around them like wings, and each one bristled with antennae. As he looked more carefully, and as the cart raced past them, he saw that some of them were based around vast, tube-like telescopes with lenses the size of a dustbin lid, while others ended in massive dish antennae that were probably designed to transmit, or scoop up, radio waves. It was like driving through an exhibit of props from some science fiction movie, except that this was real.

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘know that the Goldfinch Institute was into satellites.’

  ‘Oh, we do a lot of things,’ Todd replied. ‘Basically, if I get an idea then I sketch it out on a napkin, give it to my people and they build it.’

  ‘Everyone needs a hobby.’

  Todd shook his head. ‘Not a hobby. I don’t think I’ve sketched anything that hasn’t earned me less than ten million dollars. It’s a business. A very profitable business.’

  ‘You should put those napkins in an art gallery,’ Kieron observed.

  Todd stared at him pityingly. ‘I already have,’ he said.

  Kieron opened his mouth to answer, but closed it again. Best not to aggravate Todd too much. The man was threatening to torture and kill him, after all.

  Then again, if he was going to be tortured and killed, why not just go for wall-to-wall insults?

  Oh, he thought, but then he might decide to torture me worse. Or for longer.

  Instead, he said, ‘I guess this is a construction facility. Is that a clean room the other side of the glass? All dust and contaminants removed?’

  Todd nodded. ‘Not my favourite part of the Institute. The overheads are high, but the risk of something breaking down in orbit is too great, and you can’t send a technician out into space to repair it. No, non-lethal weapons are far better.’ He paused. ‘And lethal ones of course. I do those too.’

  The cart got to the far point of the glass tunnel, halfway across the enormous room, and Kieron gazed around in awe. The centre of the room was effectively an octagonal glass tube running right up to the ceiling. Several massive doors set into thick rubber seals allowed access to and from the satellite area. Right in the middle of the tube was something that looked a bit like a high-tech oven made out of white metal, except that it was the size of a house. Well, larger than Kieron’s house. You could drive a double-decker bus through the door. Cables and corrugated pipes emerged from the top and curved away to the ceiling, where they seemed to join what Kieron had thought was a giant air-conditioning system: square metal trunking that led away towards the walls.

  The golf cart came to a stop near to the huge door.

  ‘Right,’ said Tara, ‘get out.’

  As Kieron stepped onto the white-tiled floor he gazed at the oven-thing. It seemed to loom over him like some kind of gigantic gargoyle. It looked dangerous, like some industrial incinerator. The sight of it did not fill him with pleasant thoughts or confidence.

  Tara walked around the oven-thing, to a control console that emerged from the floor like a high-tech mushroom. She pressed a series of buttons.

  ‘So what’s this?’ Kieron asked, pointing. ‘Are you genetically engineering really, really big people here? Is this where they live?’

  ‘Space is a very harsh environment,’ Todd said, waving a hand at the myriad of satellites in the clean zone beyond the glass walls. ‘That’s why building these is so expensive. There’s pretty much zero pressure in orbit, which means not only that any sealed container, like a fuel tank, has to have really thick walls so it doesn’t burst like a balloon, but also that substances like rubber and plastic, and even some metals and some types of glass, release atoms and molecules dissolved in them or trapped in microscopic cracks, and those atoms and molecules can spray over optics and solar panels and reduce their efficiency. Also, people think that space is cold, but that’s not necessarily true. In Earth’s orbit, in direct sunlight, things can heat up to 260 degrees Celsius. Of course, if they’re not in direct sunlight then they can cool down to below minus 100. So, obviously we have to test our satellites before we launch them to make sure they can withstand the conditions, and that’s what this thing does. We put a satellite inside, reduce the pressure and then change the temperature from really cold to really hot and back again. That’s what the really big door is for, obviously.’

  Tara pressed a button on the control console. A normal-sized door that Kieron hadn’t even noticed swung open in the bottom of the much larger door.

  ‘So,’ Todd went on calmly, ‘I can’t offer you much choice in the pressure department, but do you want to be frozen or cooked? Either way it’s going to be really, really unpleasant.’

  ‘You choose,’ Kieron said, equally calmly although he felt sick. ‘I’m not going to let you make me part of this. You’re the one with his finger on the button. Well, she is, but you’re telling her what to do. I’m just an innocent bystander.’

  Todd shrugged. ‘Cold it is then. We can always turn the temperature up later.’

  ‘Hold on, Kieron,’ Bex’s voice said in his ear. ‘I’m working to get you out. Just be brave.’

  ‘If you’re going to do anything,’ Kieron muttered, ‘then now might be a good time.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice,’ Todd said. ‘Tara – if you could?’

  Tara had left th
e console without Kieron realising. She pushed him from behind. Surprised, he staggered towards the massive environmental chamber, almost tripping. She pushed him again. He grabbed hold of the door so he didn’t sprawl inside.

  ‘Hang on,’ Todd called. ‘In all the fun, I almost forgot to ask: who are you working for?’

  ‘I had a summer job in a cafe once.’ Kieron had to force the words past a throat that seemed to have swelled up in panic. ‘I got fired because I couldn’t remember the daily specials, or make a decent cappuccino. Does that count?’

  Todd nodded at Tara. She knocked Kieron’s hands away from the door and then shoved him between the shoulder blades. He fell inside the chamber. He twisted around, trying to climb back to his feet and get outside, but the door was already swinging closed against its rubber seal. A small window set into the door gave him a view of Tara’s grimly smiling face.

  ‘There’s a microphone in here,’ Todd’s voice crackled. ‘Just tell me who you’re working for and I’ll open the door. You’ll maybe lose a toe or a finger to frostbite, depending how long you resist for, but that’s OK. You’re not a golfer, are you? Losing a finger will ruin your swing. Tennis too.’

  ‘I’ve known people like you all my life,’ Kieron shouted. ‘You’re just like the bullies at school, only you’re richer. They always said they’d give my packed lunch or my schoolbooks back if only I asked nicely, but they never did. So – I can either tell you what you want to know and then die, or I can keep the information to myself and still die. One means I give in, the other means I die fighting. Guess which one I’m choosing?’

  ‘I’ll ask again once your fingers are so frozen you’d be able to snap them off like icicles,’ Todd’s voice said, ‘and when your breath starts turning to ice in your throat.’

  A throbbing sound started up. Kieron could feel the vibration through the soles of his feet. Some kind of device that would reduce the temperature in the chamber? It had to be.

  He looked around wildly. The chamber was maybe twice his height, with white metal walls and a white tiled floor marred by scuffs and scratches. Light came in through narrow but long vertical strips of glass running up to the ceiling, which was almost hidden by various pipes and vents. The glass strips had scorch marks on them, which didn’t make Kieron feel any better at all.