Full Speed

by Jacqueline Harvey

  The twins agreed and Soren showed them eight oversized bedrooms and bathrooms – although they didn’t go into Sylvie’s or Axel’s quarters – as well as a fabulous theatre room with its own snack bar. Finally he took them to his own room, which they were very keen to see. The space was impressive and had an ensuite bathroom and a loft, similar to the rooms the twins were sleeping in at their chalet, only twice the size.

  Max spotted the sketch pad on the boy’s desk and asked if he liked to draw, but to Kensy’s great relief Soren didn’t offer to show them his work. His laptop was there too, with the lid open.

  Kensy looked at her brother and he gave her a nod.

  ‘That loft looks amazing,’ she said. ‘Will you show me what’s up there?’ It was the only way to distract him so that Max might have a quick snoop on his computer.

  ‘Okay,’ the boy said, but Max begged off saying that he wasn’t a fan of high places – which in hindsight was ridiculous given he had no trouble with chairlifts and gondolas and the like on the ski fields. He said he’d stay put and check out the view. Soren seemed happy about that too and Kensy blushed when the boy offered his hand to help her at the top.

  As soon as the two were out of sight Max wriggled the mouse. Fortunately the device was still unlocked. He quickly navigated to the search engine and viewed the browser history then snapped a photograph of the page with his phone.

  ‘So, Max!’ Kensy called out loudly. ‘It’s amazing up here. Soren’s got a television and a games console and there’s two sets of bunk beds so he could have all his friends over.’ She was warning him that they were on their way back down.

  The boy quickly turned and pretended that he was looking at Soren’s bookcase. A list of websites probably wasn’t going to help too much, but it was something. While Max distracted the boy, asking if he’d read anything good recently, Kensy planted a camera and a listening device.

  ‘That’s a really cool computer,’ Max said. He was appealing to Soren’s vanity – hoping that like his father he might suddenly want to show off.

  ‘Yeah – it’s super powerful. I can do lots of interesting things with it,’ the boy said.

  Kensy frowned. ‘What do you mean? Like games and stuff?’

  Soren shook his head. ‘My father is a computer genius. He is always saying that I’m hopeless, but he’s wrong.’

  Kensy looked at her brother.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t really get what you mean,’ the girl said.

  Soren sat down and began to type. ‘Have you ever heard of the underground web?’

  Max’s jaw dropped and Kensy took a deep breath. Of course they had. Only recently they’d had a whole series of lessons with Ms Caspari, their librarian, about its uses. Mostly evil and untraceable and generally designed to do harm via hacking and theft and all manner of illicit enterprises.

  ‘Never,’ Max said.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Soren said. His fingers moved like lightning and within a minute he was somewhere they’d never seen. ‘Would you like to buy some credit cards?’

  ‘No, why would I?’ Kensy asked, the shock on her face obvious.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t either, but you can if you want,’ the boy said.

  ‘Can you hack into private accounts?’ Max asked.

  Soren nodded. ‘I can do better than that. I can hack my parents’ business and they don’t even know it.’

  The boy was an evil genius. Clearly the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, Max thought to himself.

  ‘What do you do with the information that you get?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Nothing. I just think it’s funny that my father thinks he has built an impenetrable fortress but it’s not. There are flaws and one day I will tell him.’ Soren turned and grinned. He began typing again and this time screeds of code raced across the screen. The words scrambled and unscrambled until the letters formed into something legible.

  Max leaned in. The word Cornucopia flashed up then Soren hit a button and it disappeared.

  The twins had seen that word before – it was on the letter Kensy had pulled out of the box at the apartment building where they’d seen the fake firefighter. It was addressed to a woman but none of that had seemed important at the time. Max wondered why it was on Soren’s screen.

  ‘My father thinks he’s the cleverest person in the house but he’s not,’ Soren said.

  ‘I can even get into their personal files – the ones they think are buried beneath a tonne of rocks, quite literally.’ The boy began typing again and randomly entered a password that he thought might work – but really he was just showing off. To his utter surprise it did – how he hadn’t thought of that before was beyond him, given it was so simple. This was the furthest he’d ever got.

  There were files and folders organised in alphabetical order but there was one two thirds of the way down that immediately got the boy’s attention. Soren hovered the cursor above it. Kensy had seen it too but said nothing. It wasn’t her business.

  ‘Soren!’ Fox’s voice bellowed from the end of the hall.

  Kensy looked at her watch. It was seven o’clock.

  The boy clicked out of the folder and slammed the lid on his computer.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Kensy asked.

  Soren nodded, but from the look on his face, he’d been as surprised as she was.

  As the children exited his room into the hallway they were startled to hear loud country music blaring from above. And even more horrified as they reached the top of the stairs to see Heike and Song line dancing side by side and laughing uproariously while Fox, Axel, Ed and Anna were chatting on the couch.

  If the twins didn’t know better, it was the scene of a group of people enjoying a very sociable evening, not a reconnaissance mission to bring down two of the world’s shadiest criminals. Max was worried about what would happen to Soren when things came unstuck, but he glanced over at Sylvie who had started to serve their dinner. He noticed she smiled at the boy and he had a feeling that no matter what the future held, the kid would be okay. Besides, from what Soren had just shown them he was a delinquent in the making.

  The Spencers had arrived home just after ten, having enjoyed a delicious meal of French onion soup followed by rib eye steak with potato au gratin, green beans and honey glazed carrots. Dessert was apple strudel and ice-cream.

  Fitz had emerged from the study where he’d been for most of the night and now the whole family was gathered around the island. Song offered to make hot chocolate while they debriefed the evening’s antics.

  ‘What on earth were you and Heike doing line dancing, Uncle Song?’ Kensy asked, unable to get the strange sight out of her head.

  ‘That sounds intriguing,’ Fitz said as he set a notepad down on the bench.

  ‘Ah, well,’ Song began. ‘In the course of pleasant conversation we were discussing ways that we like to keep fit and Mrs Van Leer mentioned that she was a fan of the dancing technique. I agreed with her and seconds later she was showing me her skills and insisted that I join in. She is actually quite talented, though still very scary to look at.’

  ‘Poor old Fox,’ Ed chuckled. ‘When I asked if he could direct me to the toilet just before we left I’m convinced he thought there must be something wrong with all of our bladders, given by then everyone had been at least once and Song twice.’

  Song shrugged. ‘I am an old man. Bladder problems are par for the course and besides, we should be able to hear just about everything that goes on in that house from now on.’

  The man walked into the pantry and retrieved a laptop. Seconds later he activated the software for the cameras and microphones, but despite the family having planted more than thirty devices, every screen was a blur and all the sounds were distorted.

  ‘Something must be wrong with the program,’ Song said, looking to see if there was a quick fix.

  Fitz walked around to take a look and shook his head. ‘I think the Van Leers are more paranoid about their security than we first thought. I�
��ve seen that before – they have something known as a blocker in the house. They must be running a huge server somewhere that’s creating havoc. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I suspect we’re not going to get any remote intelligence from that lot.’

  Anna sighed. She’d been so thrilled with the placement of one of her cameras, having popped an eye out of a horrid little hippo ornament and inserted one of the tiny gadgets.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t a total waste of time,’ Max said. ‘I took this,’ he held up his phone and showed the picture of Soren’s computer search history. He quickly mirrored the photograph onto the television screen so everyone could see.

  ‘Why has he been looking at the Beacon website?’ Ed asked.

  ‘We don’t know, but he showed us lots of other things too. He’s a big fan of the underground web and he has some pretty serious hacking skills,’ Max said.

  ‘That’s interesting and disturbing at the same time,’ Ed replied.

  ‘It was weird that at dinner Fox talked almost non-stop about the Beacon,’ Kensy said. ‘You don’t think they could have had something to do with the hack, do you? I mean Soren said that his father is a computer genius and Soren is as well.’

  ‘Anything’s possible,’ Anna said. ‘The man’s so cavalier boasting about his business acquisitions – how he’s brilliant at buying bargains and then he either revives the company or chops it up and sells off the assets that are still worth something. He even had the gall to tell your father and me what he’d do if he bought the Beacon.’

  ‘Well, that’s not going to happen,’ Max said.

  ‘And Heike was talking about Granny earlier in the day too, don’t forget,’ Kensy said.

  ‘Master Soren seemed very sullen at dinnertime,’ Song said. ‘Do you think he was regretting having shared his skills with you?’

  Max shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  Kensy frowned. ‘When he was showing off that he could get into his parents’ files I saw something and I’m pretty sure he did too. I got the feeling it may have been a surprise.’

  Max hadn’t noticed anything, but he was probably still too stunned by Soren’s underground web revelations at that point.

  The family looked at Kensy.

  ‘There was a file that said Soren Adoption,’ the girl said.

  ‘Whoa!’ Max gasped. ‘That would be a horrible shock if he didn’t already know.’

  ‘I thought so too,’ Kensy said.

  ‘The poor boy,’ Song tutted. ‘Though perhaps he might be relieved that he is not genetically related to those horrid parents.’

  ‘They’re still his parents,’ Anna said. ‘No matter how awful they are. If that’s true and he only found out tonight then he’s probably devastated and angry. I know I would be, especially at his age.’

  ‘Dad,’ Max said. ‘I think we need a diagram – what we’ve learned so far and who’s who.’

  ‘Now you’re thinking like a spy,’ Ed said.

  Song pressed an unseen button and a large clear screen dropped from the ceiling near the window. He passed Max a marker pen and the boy set to work, using bullet points to write abridged comments.

  ‘These are the things we know:

  Fox and Heike have a lot of money and a huge business empire – but we don’t know where the money has come from to acquire it all. They also own loads of houses and quite a few here in Zermatt by the sounds of tonight’s bragging.

  Axel and those evil-eyed twins are working together – for Fox and Heike – but one of them is also linked to James Strawbridge, but we don’t know how or why.

  So far we have nothing to pin on Fox and Heike, but Axel is planning to leave them – he isn’t their biggest fan, but he’s made a lot of money from them.

  There’s a bunker containing Russian military weapons that are going to be picked up late afternoon tomorrow bound for the UK, but we still have no idea who the buyer is or how they are getting the weapons into the country.

  Soren’s been looking at the Beacon website, he’s very familiar with the underground web and the Beacon was hacked this week – so maybe those things are linked. We still have no idea who the guy is that planted the software at the Beacon either. And Kensy heard Heike thinking about Cordelia earlier in the day.’

  Kensy glared at her brother. ‘Talking. I heard her talking on my new device,’ the girl corrected him.

  ‘And we still don’t know where Fox, Heike and Axel disappeared to the other day when I was following them on the snowmobile,’ Fitz added. ‘They vanished and it obviously wasn’t to the same place I found myself. I wonder if there’s another bunker somewhere with more hardware.’

  ‘We need to make a plan for tomorrow,’ Ed said.

  Fitz nodded. He projected a hologram map into the air from his watch. ‘There is a road up here near that bunker and by my reckoning the vehicle or vehicles to move the arms will have to be oversnow transporters to negotiate that pass at the moment. They will come from here.’ He pointed out the direction. ‘We need to catch them in the act of moving the weapons and I think if we round everyone up, we can probably keep them locked in that bunker until the Swiss authorities arrive. We can’t alert them too early or they’ll mess it up.’

  ‘What about Fox and Heike?’ Anna said. ‘If they’re not present and there’s no paper trail, what’s the point?’

  Max looked at his sister and grinned. Their mother may have protested loud and long that she didn’t want to be back in the business, but she certainly wasn’t behaving like a civilian any more.

  ‘They were up that way the other day. We have to lure them back again,’ Fitz said.

  ‘I think we should meet them for first tracks in the morning,’ Kensy said. ‘Then we can find out what they’re doing for the rest of the day.’

  ‘I agree,’ Max said.

  Then, like preparations for a football game, positions were decided and tactics discussed. Tomorrow, all things going to plan, Fox and Heike Van Leer would be brought to justice.

  Max pressed his finger against the tiny earpiece Kensy had given him. Concealed beneath his beanie and helmet, he hoped that it worked as well as the other one had for his sister. At least they might get an insight into Fox and Heike’s plans for the day, and hopefully more than that.

  Yesterday’s snow storm had blown itself out and today the mountains were picture perfect. Up ahead, at the front of the lift queue, waiting for it to open, they spied Heike and Fox, but surprisingly Axel and Soren weren’t with them.

  Max realised the pair was wearing helmets, but so far he’d heard nothing.

  He tapped Kensy on the shoulder. ‘I don’t think that thing’s working.’

  Kensy looked at the Van Leers and realised immediately that Fox and Heike were wearing white helmets today instead of the black ones where she’d planted the mind-reading patches. They were obviously coordinating with their all-white ski suits.

  ‘Oh damn!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Excuse me, Kensington, what was that for?’ Her mother glared.

  ‘Sorry, Mum, I just realised that Soren’s not here,’ the girl said, pretending that was the reason for her outburst. She then told her brother what the problem really was. Her mind was racing. All was not lost if she could get back to the Van Leers’ chalet and retrieve the devices. Though it might take some figuring out how to get them into the helmets they were wearing.

  ‘Mr Van Leer, hello!’ the girl called out.

  Anna and Ed looked at one another, wondering what she was up to now.

  At the sound of his name Fox turned and gave a wave.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I see you have taken my advice to join the early birds. We are always out catching the worms.’

  ‘Where’s Soren?’ she asked.

  ‘He is not feeling well this morning,’ Heike said. She looked past the girl to Song and gave him a little wave, curling her fingers in a strangely overfamiliar way.

  Song smiled and waved back.

  ‘New girlfrie
nd,’ Max muttered through a plastered smile and Song whacked the boy in the back with his elbow.

  Fox rolled his eyes. ‘That son of ours has a very weak constitution,’ he waved his arm dramatically in the air.

  ‘Oh, I hope he feels better soon,’ Kensy said.

  The lift opened and the skiers and boarders were soon on their way up the mountain, but Kensy was determined to get back and find those patches as soon as she could. She wanted to make sure that Soren was okay too.

  As for Axel, she hoped that the plans for the weapon collection hadn’t changed. Yesterday the three men had said it would happen late afternoon and that’s what the family was counting on. Fitz was back at the chalet coordinating with Cordelia how they would involve the Swiss authorities while the rest of them had decided to tail the Van Leers during their morning session and see if they could learn about their plans for the remainder of the day.

  As the family exited the gondola they realised that Heike and Fox had taken off and were a couple of hundred metres down the mountain already.

  ‘Might as well have some fun,’ Ed said as he and Anna donned their skis and the children and Song clicked their boots into their snowboard bindings. The twins had decided to change it up today and give their new snowboards a run. They couldn’t let Song have all the fun.

  Kensy and Max pushed off, chasing Fox and Heike with their parents right behind. Kensy turned to look for Song and was stunned to see the man launch himself off a sizeable jump, landing ahead of them and giving a big thumbs up. Apparently he wasn’t kidding about his impressive skills.

  Their goal was to catch up to Fox and Heike and make sure that someone from the family rode the next lift with them.

  The Van Leers were much better skiers than their son had acknowledged and were still a considerable way ahead.

  Max spied a snowy ramp and veered towards it. He took off, grabbing the bottom of his board as he soared high in the air. When he crunched back down, he caught sight of another boarder speeding towards him and coming in dangerously close on his left.