AWOL 1 Agent Without Licence Read online

  Sam folded his arms. ‘I don’t want to see you hurt either. That’s why I’m staying.’

  Kieron nodded, and turned his attention back to the glasses. Bex was moving through the crowd towards the two blond-haired briefcase thieves. A taxi had just stopped for them.

  ‘They’ve got a taxi,’ he said urgently.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ Sam and Bex said simultaneously.

  ‘You. Bex.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Right, Bex – I’m going to have to go offline for a while. The man who took your friend has come back. The couple you’re following have just got into a taxi. The licence plate is black with a yellow background, which means it’s like an Uber. The number is DN-1L-4262. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Wait!’ Bex said urgently in his ear. ‘There’s a security protocol built into the system. If the glasses aren’t being used for more than a few minutes they shut down, and you need a passcode to get back in. Type in “MyLittlePony1983”.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Kieron yelped.

  ‘Bradley’s idea. He said nobody would ever guess it.’

  Outside the ice-cream shake place Renner suddenly turned around and stared through the window. Kieron barely had time to sweep his hand across his face, taking the glasses off and hiding them beneath the counter. He turned his head sideways to hide the earpiece, then raised his hand and scratched his ear. The earpiece dropped into his palm. He slid it into a pocket along with the glasses.

  ‘Come on,’ Kieron said to Sam, ‘let’s go.’ He felt an almost irresistible desire to meet the gaze of the man outside. That would be fatal – literally, he suspected.

  The two of them ambled towards the door. As they got there Renner turned and moved towards them, raising his arm. Kieron had to pinch his thigh through his black jeans to stop himself from flinching, but instead of hitting him or trying to grab him Renner took hold of the door. As Kieron and Sam walked away he went into the ice-cream shake place.

  ‘That was close,’ Sam murmured. ‘Where are we going to go?’

  ‘I think we should go home,’ Kieron responded.

  ‘Yours or mine?’

  ‘Your dad’s going to be at your place, in front of the TV, and your sisters are going to be around. Not much privacy. We’ll go back to my flat.’

  ‘What about your mum?’ Sam asked.

  ‘She’s working. Won’t be back until late.’ He could hear the undertone of bitterness in his voice, and he hated it. He sounded – and felt – a lot more grown up than he should be. Than he wanted to be.

  Kieron had lost track of time, given all the excitement of connecting with Bex in Mumbai, so when he and Sam left the shopping centre he was surprised to find it was late afternoon. The sky was an overcast slate-grey. The mirrored glass panels that clad the concrete block of the shopping centre reflected the light from the sky. Only the dark edges of the panels were visible, making the block look like the skeleton of something that hadn’t been built yet.

  He and Sam walked away from the shopping centre and towards the nearby River Tyne. As they crossed the bridge that linked Newcastle to Gateshead – the waters below them only a shade or two darker than the sky – Sam spoke.

  ‘So, this person you’re talking to – she’s in India?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she’s on some kind of mission – like a secret agent?’

  ‘Yes, exactly like a secret agent.’ Kieron slipped the glasses back on, put the earpiece in. Waving his hands in mid-air he summoned up a virtual keyboard that hung in front of his eyes and moved as he walked. He typed the password that Bex had given him into it, feeling slightly embarrassed as he did so. ‘I can probably find something out about her and the people she works for with this thing. Give me a moment.’

  ‘You look like a nutter,’ Sam said. ‘People are staring.’

  ‘We’re greebs,’ Kieron pointed out. ‘People are always staring.’

  He was so caught up in reading the text on the virtual screen that he tripped and pitched forward. The real world and the virtual screen and keyboard swirled in front of his eyes. He raised his hands to cushion his fall and felt grit burning his hands as they hit the ground. The air suddenly left his lungs as his full body hit the deck.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Sam’s voice was full of concern. Kieron could feel Sam’s hands trying to turn him over. He brought his own hands up to check that the glasses and the earpiece were still there. Fortunately they hadn’t fallen off.

  With Sam’s assistance he stood back up. The heels of his hands were grazed: shredded skin and little beads of blood.

  ‘Ouch,’ he said.

  ‘You need to be careful,’ Sam pointed out.

  Kieron nodded. ‘These things should come with a health- and-safety warning. I’ll wait until we get back to my place before I do anything more.’

  ‘You haven’t damaged them, have you?’

  ‘I think they’re military grade. Probably unbreakable.’

  ‘That’s what you said about your iPhone,’ Sam muttered.

  The rest of the walk took them twenty minutes, past Saltwell Park and into the old red-brick terraces of Low Fell. The houses had once been grand affairs occupied by well-off families, but now they had been separated into flats – ground floor, first floor and sometimes a second floor, with the imposing front doors replaced in many cases by two narrower doors side by side. In some cases the floors of the houses had been subdivided into individual one-room flats, with shared bathrooms and kitchens. He and his mother were lucky enough to have one complete floor of a house: two bedrooms and a small lounge, as well as their own narrow kitchen that you had to walk through to get to the tiny bathroom. The bathroom door slid across the doorway and locked with a sliding bolt that was missing half its screws. Every time Kieron had a bath or used the toilet he worried that his mum, or one of her friends when they came over to share a bottle of wine, might pull too hard on the door handle and wrench the bolt completely off.

  His mother wasn’t home. He and Sam climbed the stairs to the hall that linked all the rooms together. Ignoring the lounge, they went into his bedroom.

  The funny thing about going into a room in your own house with someone else, Kieron thought ruefully, was that you saw it through their eyes rather than your own. He was suddenly painfully aware of the fact that the carpet was invisible: covered with discarded T-shirts, several pairs of black jeans, a couple of coffee mugs and three or four plates with half-eaten meals on them. He suspected there were another couple of plates hidden beneath the bed, but he really didn’t want to think about what might be growing on them.

  Sam stared at the Fatal Insomnia poster blu-tacked to the wall behind his bed.

  ‘We never did finish working out how we were going to get into the gig,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Stuff happened.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sam nodded. ‘Strange stuff. You got any cans in the fridge?’

  ‘I think there’s some cola. Go and get a couple, will you? And some cheese, if there’s any.’

  While Sam was gone, Kieron quickly summoned up a keyboard and screen again, partly to check that the system still worked after his fall but also to complete the search he’d been making. By the time Sam came back with two cans and a plastic bag of grated cheddar he’d found what he was looking for.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘the woman I’ve been talking to is Rebecca Wilson. Her friend – the one who got taken from the shopping centre – is Bradley Marshall. They’re both freelance operatives working under contract to something called SIS-TERR.’

  ‘Does that make her your big SIS-TERR?’ Sam asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Shut up,’ Kieron said. ‘SIS-TERR stands for the Secret Intelligence Service Technology-Enhanced Remote Reinforcement Unit. It looks like the two of them ran a start-up to develop the glasses and the earpiece, demonstrated them to the Secret Intelligence Service – which is what MI6 is really called, apparently – and then got employed full-time on missions. Bex was in the Army for a while, so she’s got the training. She goes undercover, and Bradley supports her with information.’

  ‘From a shopping centre in Newcastle?’

  ‘From wherever he wants to be. Or needs to be.’

  ‘Kind of like high-tech mercenaries,’ Sam pointed out.

  ‘Yeah, but working for the good guys full-time, it looks like.’

  ‘And can you still see what she’s seeing right now?’

  Kieron shook his head. ‘It’s switched off now. I guess if she needs me, she’ll call.’

  ‘Needs you?’ Sam shook his head sadly. ‘Look, mate, she might be working for MI6, but you’re not. You know that, don’t you?’

  Kieron knew that Sam was trying to help, but the words stung. ‘She needs help,’ Kieron pointed out defensively, ‘and her friend has been kidnapped. I don’t think she knows who to trust any more. I’m the only person who can feed her the information she needs.’

  ‘You’re her last, best hope?’ Sam snorted. ‘She’s in trouble then.’ He frowned. ‘Hey – if that thing can access top-secret databases, you might be breaking the Official Secrets Act right now. What if her bosses in MI6 can track you back here?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ Kieron felt less convinced than his words and his tone of voice suggested, but he didn’t want Sam to know that. ‘The reach-back into the MI6 computers is limited. As far as I can see, I can only access classified stuff related to the mission they’ve been contracted to do, plus lots of unclassified but difficult to get hold of things like licence plates, blueprints of buildings and personnel records for various companies and organisations. Kind of like a super-Wikipedia.’ He waved Sam towards his games console. ‘Why don’t you play for a while. I want to check on what’s happening to Bex.’
br />   ‘Why do you get to have all the fun?’ Sam wanted to know, irritably.

  ‘Hey – at least you’ll be able to control where you move, and you can fire guns and stuff at zombies. I’m just a passenger in this thing.’

  Sam didn’t seem mollified, but he started booting up the console while Kieron reactivated the glasses and earpiece, and yelled as he was suddenly jerked backwards and thrown into a world of vivid colours, blurred, jerky motion and the high-pitched whine of a two-stroke engine.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Sam called, concerned.

  ‘Just – acclimatising,’ Kieron said tightly.

  It looked as if Bex was in a car. No, Kieron corrected himself as she briefly glanced down and he saw her hands gripping a pair of handlebars, she was on a motorcycle. She was driving down a road lined with open shopfronts piled high with baskets of fruit and vegetables, tottering piles of books wrapped in transparent plastic, rolls of brightly printed cloth and all kinds of other things that Kieron couldn’t even identify. Her motorcycle – probably a moped, he thought – wove back and forth between various cars – some dusty and battered, some polished and expensive – which were just parked in the road while their drivers negotiated with the shop owners. Up ahead was the taxi that Kieron had seen the two blond-haired thugs get into earlier. Bex held back, keeping them in sight without, hopefully, alerting them to her presence.

  ‘Where did you get the moped from?’ he asked, activating his microphone with a small gesture of his hand.

  The picture he was watching shifted abruptly as the moped swerved.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Bex snapped in his ear.

  ‘Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ she asked. ‘Are you safe?’

  ‘We’re back at my mum’s flat.’

  ‘Is she there?’

  ‘No, she’s at work. She won’t be back for a couple of hours.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘She works in Human Resources for some big company here in Newcastle. Her department used to be eight people. It’s only three now, but the work is still at the same level, so everyone’s working massive amounts of overtime, and she doesn’t get paid for all of it.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she said, veering around a man just standing in the middle of the street talking on his mobile phone. He gestured angrily at her as she passed, and shouted something.

  ‘It is what it is,’ Kieron said philosophically.

  ‘And your dad?’

  ‘Walked out a few years ago.’ He laughed, but there was no humour in the sound. ‘Mum said he got a better offer from a younger, blonder woman. Actually, “woman” wasn’t the word she used.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Bex paused for a moment as she negotiated a cloud of dust thrown up by the wheels of a lorry between her and the taxi.

  ‘So – this moped?’ Kieron asked again, not wanting to continue the conversation about his dysfunctional family situation.

  ‘Yes. Someone had left it by the side of the road.’

  ‘Just left it? Really?’

  Bex edged her moped sideways so she could see around the lorry. Ahead, the taxi was turning a corner. ‘Well, I say “left”. They were standing beside it. My need was greater than theirs. Look, I’ll leave it somewhere when I’ve finished with it. The police will return it.’

  ‘Or someone else will steal it,’ Kieron pointed out.

  ‘What are you – the voice of my conscience?’

  He laughed. ‘Just call me Jiminy Cricket.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve read Pinocchio?’

  ‘Seen the film.’

  Kieron watched as Bex’s hand twisted the accelerator on the handlebar of the moped and undertook the lorry with a burst of speed, then braked as she got to the corner. The lorry driver blared his horn at her.

  ‘The old Disney one?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The new live-action and CGI remake, with Johnny Depp as Pinocchio.’

  ‘I suddenly feel old,’ she muttered.

  Ahead, the taxi slowed to a halt. Bex drove casually past it, then came to a stop by an open shopfront stocked, bizarrely, with cages filled with kittens, puppies and small birds. Kieron found himself hoping that it was a pet shop, not a food shop.

  Bex set the moped back on its stand. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘let’s see what these two are doing.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Mumbai street was a riot of colour and scent. Wherever Bex looked, people were wearing brightly coloured shirts or saris. Behind them were open shopfronts stacked up with fruit and vegetables, tottering piles of books wrapped in plastic sheeting, and animals – kittens, puppies and parrots in tiny cages. The shops competed with each other to have the most attention-grabbing awnings, and above them were massive posters advertising beauty products, electronic devices and, strangely, local politicians with gleaming white smiles. Or perhaps they were toothpaste adverts; it was difficult to tell. But while her eyes were being dazzled by the confusion of sights, her nose was being assaulted by the smell of a hundred different spices – some of which were piled up in heaps in bowls in front of the shops, so vivid they almost glowed. The symphony of spice scents overlaid but didn’t quite disguise the smell of rotting vegetables and sewage that seemed to characterise that part of Mumbai. And – she frowned – she thought she could smell … yes, fresh laundry. Washing powder. How strange.

  The street to which she’d followed the briefcase thieves was clogged with traffic: a combination of battered old cars, shiny new ones and three-wheeled motorised auto-rickshaws. They had an enclosed cabin to keep off the rain, but no doors, and there was only room for the driver up front. In the back the passengers sat on a padded bench.

  She looked around, trying to seem like a tourist while the two blond-haired thieves paid their taxi driver, but genuinely fascinated by the whole look and feel of the city. She’d travelled widely in Asia during her gap year, but she’d missed out on India – replacing it with Indonesia and Thailand. This, from what she could see, was the real Mumbai – not the old Victorian part left behind by the English when they pulled out of India or the pretty bits that the visitors wanted to see, but the areas where the people who actually called the city home lived their day-to-day lives.

  She could hear, above the cries of street vendors and the buzz of motorcycle and moped engines, a regular slapping sound. She couldn’t see what was causing it. Still distracted by the smell of washing powder, she crossed the pavement from where she had left her moped (well, the moped she had temporarily borrowed) towards a chest-high brick wall plastered with posters telling anyone who passed about local dance festivals, religious events and concerts. It was the kind of wall that, in England, would have given a view of a train track or a river below. That’s what Bex expected now, but what she saw was so unusual, so Indian, that she couldn’t help but smile.

  It looked like a river probably did flow down there, at right angles to the street, but it was almost impossible to see it thanks to the hundreds of lines of washing that had been strung across it. They receded into the distance, looking like some bizarre spider’s web in which various scraps of coloured paper had been caught. Bex could just about make out, through the flapping clothes, sheets and pillowcases, that the slanting banks of the river had been covered with concrete. Where the water should have been was a mass of soapy bubbles, and the concrete thronged with women, all dressed in saris, who were busy dipping more clothes and bedding into the soapy water, pulling them out, twisting them into ropes and then hitting them against the concrete as hard as they could to expel the water. That explained the slapping noise she had heard. Once the women had got as much water as they could out of the clothes, they hung them up on the lines to let them dry in the heat, although given the humidity Bex suspected that there was almost as much water in the air as in the massive outdoor laundry she had found. Seeing the preponderance of sheets and pillowcases, Bex assumed that most of the hotels in Mumbai probably sent their dirty washing here to be cleaned. It certainly made her wonder if the sheet she had slept on the night before – the sheet she had assumed had been through a thorough wash since the last hotel guest had slept on it – had actually been dipped in a soapy river and hit against concrete to get it clean.

  India. What a country.