AWOL 2

by Andrew Lane

  Bex watched while Kieron used the ARCC kit to infiltrate the Goldfinch Institute’s servers and place a spurious appointment in Todd Zanderbergen’s calendar. His hands moved gracefully and expertly through the air, moving data around and altering it. He really was a natural at this, she thought admiringly. If she was going to be using that same kit to provide information to him when he was in the meeting the next day, then she was going to have to get some practice in. Maybe a couple of hours while the boys were asleep. She’d trained herself to get by on only about five hours a night – she might as well use the rest of the time to prepare.

  ‘Right,’ Kieron said eventually. ‘That’s done. I’m in for 11 a.m. tomorrow.’

  ‘In that case, go back to your room and get some sleep. Rest, and I’ll see you for breakfast at about eight.’

  ‘Chances are I won’t sleep,’ Sam muttered. ‘Jet lag.’

  ‘Jet lag won’t really affect you, flying west across the Atlantic. It’ll hit you when we fly back though,’ Bex said. She rooted around in her handbag and bought out a container of pills. ‘Take one of these, both of you.’

  ‘What are they?’ Kieron asked suspiciously.

  ‘Melatonin. It’s a hormone the body produces naturally at night. It gets your body ready to go to sleep. We’re eight hours behind the UK here, so your brains think it’s now morning and you’ve stayed up through the night. Take the melatonin and you’ll be fooling your body into resetting its clock.’

  ‘OK.’ Kieron took the container tentatively. ‘If you’re sure.’

  The two boys went to their room, and Bex set to work, using the ARCC kit to scatter little traces of Ryan Allen’s life around the Internet, just difficult enough to find that anyone looking would be persuaded that they were actual facts rather than constructed bits of fake data. It took her three hours, but it was useful. It had been a while since she had used the equipment – Bradley was the expert – but the mental muscle-memory was still there. By the time she’d finished she felt confident that she could support Kieron as well as he’d done for her in Mumbai and Pakistan.

  Still wide awake, she decided to go for a drive. It was good practice to reconnoitre in advance if you were going on a mission. Discover the ways in and the ways out. Work out your options for in case anything went wrong. So she left her room, walked out to the hire car and drove away from central Albuquerque, along wide and gently curving roads towards the desert that surrounded the city. Night had fallen, and rather than turn the air conditioning on she rolled the windows down and let the breezes and sounds of the resting city come to her. The heat of the day had faded to a comfortable warmth now, but the scent of desert flowers was still marked, along with the smell of kerosene drifting across from the Air Force base. Through force of habit she checked her rear-view mirror every thirty seconds or so to see if there was ever a set of headlights that remained stubbornly behind her, but the cars she saw all turned off the road after a while, their drivers heading to their own homes, to restaurants, cinemas or bars. There was no reason for anyone to be following her, but it was like indicating before making a turn: something her brain automatically did without her having to tell it. A survival instinct.

  The Goldfinch Institute was located some ten miles north of Albuquerque, on a route that she noticed with a smile eventually led to the town of Roswell. The boys would love that: Roswell was where the fabled Area 51 was supposed to be located: the military base which housed the hangars where a crashed alien spacecraft had allegedly been kept and evaluated by the American military since the 1950s. Rubbish of course, but it was a legend that just wouldn’t die.

  The Institute itself was a mile down a spur road off the main highway. There were no signs for it: if you were heading for the Goldfinch Institute it was because you wanted to go there and already knew where it was. A subtle intelligence test, of sorts. Bex slowed down and parked on the dusty hard shoulder just before the turning, in the shadow of a massive advertising hoarding telling her all about the health benefits of some miracle juicer. She checked the car’s satnav. The spur road was marked, but according to the map it led nowhere: no houses, no towns, nothing. Her original intention had been to drive down and check out the main gates and the fences – drive around the Institute if possible and take some photographs – but she decided against it. There was a very good chance there would be CCTV cameras trained on the road, and number-plate recognition software that would note her car’s details for later analysis. Maybe even low-light, image-intensifying cameras that could get a good image of her face, even in the dark. It wasn’t worth taking the chance.

  She was just about to turn around and head back to town, get a few hours’ sleep, when she saw a light down the spur road. On instinct, Bex turned her own headlights off. For a while the light seemed to just bounce around, illuminating the dusty tarmac and the scrubby cactus-like bushes that lined the route on either side, before it resolved into the twin beams of a car’s headlights. The sparse starlight, and the splash back from the beams, soon revealed the bare lines of a sports car manoeuvring along the road towards her.

  At the junction with the main road, the car slowed down before turning. Bex sat quietly, not moving. Maybe it was a late worker, heading home, or maybe it was the Institute’s security guards on patrol. Either way, she didn’t want them to know she was there.

  The car accelerated into a turn, heading back the way Bex had come, towards Albuquerque. When its lights caught the advertising hoarding and reflected momentarily back, illuminating the driver, Bex felt the breath catch in her throat as she recognised Tara Gallagher, her old friend from MI6 training. She was older, and she’d dyed her hair red, but Bex would have known her anywhere. They’d spent too long together in muddy ditches and in dimly lit bars for that.

  The car rounded the corner and sped away. Tara’s head didn’t turn. She hadn’t seen Bex.

  It took fifteen seconds before Bex felt she could breathe again. What were the odds that she and Tara would end up at the same remote road junction in a foreign country at the same time of night? Was that an omen, or was it a warning? Bex wasn’t sure, but as she drove back to town – slowly, so she didn’t run the risk of overtaking Tara and giving her old work colleague (and, she admitted to herself, one-time friend) a possible view of her face – she turned the unlikely encounter over and over in her mind. One way or the other, she decided, it was a bad sign.

  Tara’s car had either got to town way ahead of her or had turned off, perhaps down a side road leading to some exclusive development of ranch-style houses, and Bex got back to the hotel without incident. She checked the car park carefully before parking, and used her key card to enter the hotel through a side entrance rather than the main lobby just in case someone was watching. She got to her room, undressed and brushed her teeth and was asleep within moments. She didn’t dream.

  The next morning she met the boys in the restaurant for breakfast. It took a few moments for her to recognise them: automatically she’d been looking for them in their emo – sorry, greeb – guises, but they were neat and tidy, in the clothes she’d bought for them the day before. They’d even washed their hair and shaved the few hairs they had – ‘bum fluff’, her mum would have called it – from their chins. She felt strangely proud.

  Breakfast was the standard American buffet arrangement, and they’d stacked their plates up with bacon, mushrooms, scrambled egg, sausages, hash browns and refried beans. Kieron had even balanced several slices of cheese on top of his pile, while Sam had poured maple syrup over his.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said reassuringly, ‘you’re allowed to go back as many times as you want. You don’t have to carry the absolute maximum away on your first visit to the buffet bar.’

  They stared at her, wide-eyed.

  ‘Really?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Really,’ she said.

  While the boys ate everything on their plates and then went back for more, Bex contented herself with a coffee and toast. After they’d all finish
ed their breakfast, she looked at Kieron.

  ‘Ready for this?’ she asked.

  ‘As I’ll ever be,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  Bex slid the ARCC glasses across the table towards him – not the special VR ones that he was used to wearing, and which she had used the night before to seed his new identity across the Internet, but the ones she generally wore on missions. The undercover ones. The ones that looked like ordinary glasses, but which had concealed cameras and microphones in the frame that would transmit everything Kieron saw and heard to her, wherever she chose to base herself.

  ‘Put these on,’ she said. ‘They’ll make you look even more like a tech-savvy teenager than you already do.’

  As he placed the glasses on his nose, she passed him the tiny earpiece that would slip inside his ear canal and relay everything she said to him, undetectably. She smiled. ‘Come on – let’s go. We’ve got an undercover operation to complete.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As Kieron and Bex drove from the hotel to the Goldfinch Institute – Sam having decided to go back to bed – Kieron spent the first ten minutes trying to get used to the fact that his glasses weren’t showing him anything – there was no video feed. Everything was reversed now. Bex had access to the Internet and lots of secret databases; he had nothing.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, and he had the bizarre experience of hearing her voice normally and also, slightly tinnily, through the earpiece buried inside his right ear canal.

  ‘Honestly – trying to get used to it,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ she confided. ‘I can see the road ahead directly of me, and also through your glasses. It’s like watching a 3-D movie with the glasses on backwards: really disconcerting. It’s been a long time since I wore these glasses in anger.’

  Kieron watched the traffic as they drove through Albuquerque. Most of the cars looked familiar – except they seemed larger and shinier – but the trucks! They were massive things, with huge cabs with blacked-out windows and silver exhausts that ran up the side of the cabs like chimneys. And there were adverts everywhere he looked. Adverts for hair products, painkillers, law services and anything else you might want. There were even adverts for candidates in the elections for the local sheriff: photographs of pleasant-faced men with big smiles and big hats, all promising to fix whatever law-enforcement problems existed in the city.

  After a while they left the city behind and they were driving through dusty desert. Glancing to his left, Kieron noticed something moving parallel to them. It took a few seconds before he realised that it was a train, but one that had to be ten times longer than any train he’d seen in England. And it had no passengers – just an apparently endless line of cargo containers all joined together. He couldn’t see the engine at the front, or the far end.

  ‘This place is incredible,’ he murmured.

  Bex turned the car off the main road and headed down a narrower track. Five minutes later a cluster of buildings appeared on the horizon. Bright sunlight reflected from blue glass panels that seemed to cover every surface. Each building was wider at the bottom than the top – like pyramids made of glass with the tops cut off. A forest of antennae covered their roofs. No, hang on, Kieron thought, amazed: there were some antennae, but they were set among what looked suspiciously like a real forest. Thin saplings with leafy tops rising up out of a sea of shrubs.

  ‘Is that …?’ he asked.

  Bex slowed the car down to a crawl, then took one hand off the wheel and waved it around, accessing the feed from Kieron’s glasses. She must have been zooming in on what he was looking at, because she suddenly said, ‘It’s like a garden. There’s grass, and benches to sit on, and some big shades so people can keep out of the sun.’

  ‘The Goldfinch Institute really cares for its staff,’ Kieron observed.

  Bex sped the car up again. ‘Unless it’s all for the use of the man in charge – Todd Zanderbergen.’

  ‘Do these ARCC glasses have reactive lenses?’ Kieron asked. ‘Cos the sun reflecting off all that glass is really bright.’

  ‘No, but even if they did it would be best not to use them,’ Bex answered. ‘People don’t trust you if they can’t see your eyes. Even if you’re lying to them, they’re more likely to believe you if you’re not wearing sunglasses. Strange, but true.’

  The buildings got closer and closer, looming up over the horizon like some bright, shining citadel. Kieron felt his stomach start to knot with tension. This was suddenly becoming real.

  A three-metre-high chain-link security fence appeared. Coils of razor wire had been strung along the top. There would be no getting over that in a hurry. And even if it was possible, another fence rose up three metres behind it. Each fence had signs warning anyone who got close enough that they were electrified. The desiccated corpses of various birds lined up along the base of the fences – crows mainly, Kieron thought, but a few hawks as well – just served to reinforce the warnings. Overkill? Perhaps.

  They continued along the road as it curved to follow the fence. After a few minutes they came to a gap blocked by waist-high metal sheets set into the ground. They seemed to glow in the sunlight. The air itself shimmered above them, indicating how much heat they had absorbed. A security cabin sat just inside the fence with a small tarmacked car-parking area just outside. A few metres to one side, a row of turnstiles with small boxes at eye level allowed staff to enter and leave the premises.

  Bex drove the car up to the metal panels. Kieron checked out their reflections in the shiny metal. Both he and Bex looked calm and professional, he was relieved to see.

  A uniformed security guard armed with a handgun strapped ostentatiously to his waist stepped out. He wore sunglasses and carried a clipboard, and his uniform looked as if it had been cleaned and ironed just moments before. He held up a large hand. His other hand was on the handle of his gun.

  ‘Please turn off your engine, ma’am. What is your business here today?’

  Bex lowered her window and was about to say something when Kieron put his hand on her arm.

  ‘Let me handle this,’ he said. Lowering his own window, he waved a casual hand at the guard. ‘Ryan Allen,’ he called. ‘I have an appointment with Mr Zanderbergen.’

  The guard checked his clipboard. ‘Mr Allen?’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Kieron said loudly.

  ‘Could you step out of the car, please?’

  Kieron waved his hand dismissively. ‘It’s cool in here, and it’s hot outside. I’m from England; I don’t do “warm”, let alone “hot”. Let me in, or don’t let me in. I have something your boss wants to see.’

  The guard’s expression didn’t change, but his body language suggested he was getting tense. He pulled a walkie-talkie from the back of his belt and spoke into it. Soon he said, ‘OK, if you could park up on the tarmac, they’ll send a buggy for you.’

  ‘“Buggy” sounds very open,’ Kieron called back. ‘I told you – I don’t like the heat.’

  The guard held his hands up apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s security. No choice in the matter.’

  ‘Don’t push it,’ Bex said softly. ‘You’re in. Get out and wait for the buggy. I’ll park up and wait for you.’ She paused, and smiled. ‘Oh, and well done. That was perfectly managed.’

  ‘Wish me luck,’ he said, getting out of the car. The dry heat of the desert seemed to suddenly hit him in the face. He felt a prickle on his forehead as if he should be sweating, but there was no sweat. It evaporated instantly. He supposed that might be an issue if he spent too long outside – he’d be dehydrating without realising it. He’d have to watch that.

  ‘You don’t need luck,’ Bex’s voice said in his ear as he swung the car door shut. ‘You’ll be brilliant.’

  He stepped up to the barrier. The security guard stared at him impassively from behind his sunglasses. Kieron smiled at him.

  After a few minutes a golf-buggy appeared from behind one of the
glass buildings and raced towards the barrier. The guard vanished back inside his cabin and no doubt pressed a button, because the metal plates suddenly retracted into the ground. Stepping out of the cabin again, the guard gestured to Kieron to walk inside the fence.

  ‘Quick,’ he said.

  ‘What happens if I’m not quick?’

  The guard’s expression didn’t change. ‘The barriers spring back up and they cut you in half.’

  ‘You’re joking, right?’ Kieron said, but he wasn’t entirely sure so he got a move on. As he entered the Goldfinch Institute’s grounds, he heard the plates slide up behind him. He thought one of them just brushed against his heels, but he wasn’t sure.

  The golf buggy swung around so that it was side-on to him. There was no driver. Kieron glanced around, wondering if he was the victim of some trick, but the guard was looking at him in exasperation.

  ‘It’s automatic,’ he called. ‘Just get in; it’ll take you where you need to go.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Kieron asked. ‘Because I’ve seen this in films, and it never ends well.’

  The guard just stared at him.

  Kieron climbed into the passenger side and waited. After a few seconds the cart started off.

  It took him along the side of the glass buildings and then down a glass-walled canyon between them. The breeze of its passage cooled Kieron down, for which he was grateful. He hadn’t been lying about not doing well in the heat. Eventually the cart came smoothly to a halt beside a set of sliding glass doors in a glass wall.

  Kieron entered the glass building. Or the lion’s den, as he couldn’t help thinking of it. He noticed that a security scanner had been built into the door frame. What was it scanning for? he wondered – guns, explosives, or maybe any high-tech equipment. Like the ARCC glasses.

  Inside the air was cool, and the sunshine was muted by what he now realised was the floor-to-ceiling mirrored glass. A long reception desk was occupied by a red-haired young man working on a computer. He was wearing a tracksuit. Several very plush chairs dotted around looked more like exotic mushrooms than anything a person might sit comfortably in.