Operation Hurricane: The Evan Boyd Adventures #1

by Benjamin Shaw

  ‘Well, I am glad to see we’re keeping you so comfortable,’ the man said.

  Boyd lifted his head and opened his eyes, as if he had just been about to drop off into a nice, relaxing sleep. ‘Well, now you mention it, I do have one or two minor complaints. Do you have a suggestion box?’ he said, keeping his voice neutral.

  The man tilted his head and cracked a strained smile. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  Even though he was dressed in the kind of overalls a racing driver wears, Boyd, like any resident of Bloomfield, had recognised the man immediately.

  ‘You’re Lord Ravensbrook.’ Boyd sat up slightly and nodded his head. ‘Now this is interesting.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Because I knew that whoever walked through that door was the complete lunatic who’s been chasing me since last week. I wouldn’t have put any money on it being you.’

  ‘Good!’ Ravensbrook let a loud laugh erupt from his throat. ‘I’m rather glad I wasn’t on your radar – it means I’m doing something right.’ He sat on the sofa opposite Boyd. ‘I apologise for all the theatrics, I really do. I’m not one for all that. But sometimes these things are only resolved if you take a certain type of action and that’s where she comes in.’ Ravensbrook gestured towards Hornet, who was still standing by the door.

  ‘Who is she?’ Boyd asked, doing his best to keep his voice from cracking.

  ‘Surely you know your aunt when you see her?’

  ‘I know a liar when I see one.’

  ‘You’re right. Good point well made. You have my word, that’s the last lie I will tell you. Let me try again: she is Hornet, a lethal and cruel assassin who has worked for me for more than a decade. She was put in place as your aunt to keep watch over you. Now, ask me another; anything you want.’

  ‘Why did you need to keep watch over me?’

  ‘That’s a good one! You see, we knew that one day, people would come for you. But we had no idea – it’s almost comical really. If we’d known then what we know now, well, it would have saved so much time. The fact is, you are exceptional, Boyd. And there are those that would seek to exploit you, perhaps even destroy you. I will not let that happen. You must understand, you are safe here with us, no matter who tells you any different. The truth you long for is that this world is made up of two kinds of people: those who jump into the fire and those who live in fear of getting burnt. The greatest accomplishments in human history only came about because someone was brave enough to run into the flames, while the rest of the world simply stood at a safe distance and sneered. A time is coming, very soon, where everything will change and you will have to decide which type of person you are, and which side of history you want to be on. Together, we can have everything, you and I. Remember that.’

  All the times Boyd had seen Lord Ravensbrook on television or even when he visited his school, the affable adventurer had seemed so ordinary, funny and inspiring. It’s why everyone seemed to love him. But looking into his eyes, Boyd saw beyond that now: it was all an act and the real man behind the mask was in front of him, talking about taking over the world. He was barking mad and he did a great job of hiding it, but maybe now was not the right time to bring it up.

  ‘So, what is it that makes me exceptional?’

  Ravensbrook checked his watch and waved a hand, he was done. Boyd could see him transform back in front of his eyes. In an instant, the maniacal millionaire became the good-natured adventurer again. He slapped his hands on his thighs. ‘We will get to that, my boy, we have plenty of time ahead of us. For now, I want you to settle in here.’ Lord Ravensbrook stood and moved back towards the door.

  Boyd leant forward onto his knees. ‘And where exactly is here?’

  Ravensbrook turned around, a smile of surprise etched across his lips. ‘You really don’t remember, do you? This is where it all began, Boyd. Welcome home.’

  Elementary, My Dear Fitz

  Schmidt had left the airport, dumped his bags at a hotel and gone straight to the London Underground. Fitz and Azima followed on foot as the tall, German scientist bounded out of his hotel and headed for the Bakerloo Line. Azima had the tracking app on her phone, so they could calmly follow at a distance. But both were aware that they needed to find an opportunity to get this done without rousing Schmidt’s suspicion, and time was running out.

  They were standing on the platform at Maida Vale, a little too close to Schmidt for Azima’s liking. She waited for him to look down the tunnel for the approaching train and she carefully observed everything about him: his clothes, shoes and the book he was carrying. Then she moved them down to the end of the platform and when the train arrived, they boarded the last carriage. They passed through the first few stations in silence, then Fitz turned to Azima and spoke over the clatter of the train.

  ‘So, where are you from?’ Fitz asked, making conversation to take his mind off things.

  ‘Syria,’ Azima replied, proudly.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah, pretty much.’

  ‘How did you… y’know…’

  ‘How did I get out? How did I get to here?’

  ‘Yeah, all of the above.’

  ‘I lost everything: my home, my family. You can’t even imagine it. I can’t sometimes; it feels unreal,’ Azima said, staring into space as the train moved off.

  ‘No, you’re right, I can’t even begin. I’m not sure I’d be able to carry on.’

  ‘You would, Fitz. You carry on because you have to. It’s like this, what we’re doing now – you get up off your butt and do it because no one is going to do it for you. I used to feel bad for myself all the time, but it made me sad, it made me different from how my mother would want me to be, so I stopped. Now I think of my family and I am happy. I am lucky. I found Skye and she changed my life. She is my family now. I owe her everything.’

  ‘We’ll find them,’ Fitz said, but he could see that Azima wasn’t really listening, she was looking at the map of the Bakerloo line on the wall of the train.

  Azima stood up and dragged him towards the doors. ‘Come on, we’re getting out here.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I just do. Follow me and we can get ahead of him.’

  The trained squealed to a halt and Azima was out of the train and up the stairs so fast, Fitz struggled to keep pace. He stepped out into the sunlight at Baker Street Station and she was waiting for him.

  ‘Round here, quick.’ She turned right and headed along Baker Street. ‘Cross here,’ Azima said, dragging Fitz across the road, between a bus and a taxi.

  ‘Whoa! Are you trying to get me killed?’ Fitz turned and saw the familiar bald head atop a tall, thin frame as Schmidt weaved along the pavement. ‘He’s over there, on the other side of the road.’

  ‘Not for long. Get the camera out, get ready with it – I know where he’s going. Stop looking at me like I don’t know what I’m doing, Fitz.’

  ‘I’m sorry! And it’s quite the opposite. I find it quite worrying that you seem to know exactly what you’re doing.’

  Fitz flipped his backpack around and pulled out the modified SLR camera. The adjustments he had made meant that he just had to get Schmidt to press the shutter-release button once and hold the camera for 45 seconds and they would have a perfect scan of his vein configuration. If he pressed it twice, it would stop the scan. Fitz had also installed a 128-kilobytes-per-second voice recorder in the camera, so they just needed to capture him saying his name and they’d have everything they needed.

  Fitz fumbled with the camera as he followed Azima down a packed Baker Street. ‘Can you still see him?’ he said, flustered.

  ‘Yes. Relax and try to be a little more covert.’

  ‘Has he crossed the street yet?’

  ‘No, but he will. Don’t panic.’

  ‘How do you know? What if we lose him?’

  Azima slowed and gently tugged at Fitz’s arm. He turned to her. ‘The book he was reading,’ she whispered. Then she amplified her
voice along with her accent, ‘Here it is! 221B!’ She pointed at a black door, next to a shop with an old-fashioned sign that read: ‘The Sherlock Holmes Museum.’

  A horn blared out to their right as Schmidt crossed the road in front of a car. Azima stood in front of the shop and pretended to point at things in the window. In the reflection, Fitz could see Schmidt finding a spot on the edge of the kerb as he struggled to capture an acceptable selfie that didn’t have irritable Londoners in the background. Then, as he turned, Fitz saw it: on top of Schmidt’s bag was a well-worn paperback book, ‘A Study in Scarlet – A Sherlock Holmes Mystery’.

  Azima approached the scientist. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, her English suddenly broken as if every word was a struggle. ‘I can take a photo of you in front of the door if you take one for me and my boyfriend?’

  Schmidt took a moment before shaking his head. He clearly wasn’t the type to just trust a stranger with his phone. ‘No, thank you,’ he replied, straight-lipped.

  Azima wasn’t giving up that easily. She physically shoved the wiry German into place in front of the shop. Then she took his phone and stepped back. She held out her hand to two people who were about to walk in front of her and barked, ‘Wait one second, please!’ They stopped, their faces a picture of frustration but they didn’t say a word. Azima fired off a round of pictures and then waved them through. ‘Here.’ She handed Schmidt his phone.

  He looked at her in disbelief. When he checked the pictures on his phone, he smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he said, nodding. He smiled and showed her a set of bright white teeth.

  ‘You are very welcome,’ she said back. Azima then took the SLR camera from Fitz, handed it to Schmidt and pointed at the shutter release. ‘Just press once, okay?’

  She and Fitz took up position on the steps. Azima nodded to Schmidt and he pressed the button. Azima left the steps before he could offer to take another picture; she didn’t want him to press the button again and abort the scan. She took her time getting across the crowded pavement to him as she counted down from 45. She then remembered her rucksack on the step and went back for it, all the while, the SLR camera would be busy scanning Schmidt’s hand. She reached him as the timer in her head arrived at 40 seconds. ‘I am Dalila Salah.’ Azima purposefully held out her left hand.

  Schmidt looked down at it and extended his own. ‘I am Erlich Schmidt. Pleased to meet you.’

  Fitz joined them. ‘Erling Smith?’ he asked.

  ‘Erlich,’ Schmidt said, a little frustrated. ‘Erlich Schmidt.’

  ‘Ah! Gotcha. I had an uncle called Erlich, great guy. Anyway, it’s been lovely, cheers.’ Fitz nodded and took the camera. ‘Bye!’ he said as he popped his rucksack back on and marched off towards London Zoo.

  Azima waved and smiled as she left a slightly bewildered Schmidt on the pavement. When she caught up with Fitz, he was playing with the camera. ‘Did we get it?’ she asked him as they dodged the half-term crowds. ‘Fitz, did we get it?’

  He smiled. ‘We got it.’

  ‘Good. Let’s get back to the Toy Shop. You’ve got work to do.’

  This Is Our Target

  ‘So, ladies and gentlemen, this is our target.’ Harry was waving a pencil towards a 3D projection of the Barn. The flickering image was rising out of a virtual-reality table at the Toy Shop, one of Barnaby’s proudest creations. The rest of the team were crowded around, listening intently.

  ‘3D projection table?’ Fitz scoffed. ‘I thought you lot were broke? You’re like Dexter Ferguson at school, pleading poverty when we’re at the shop, then turns up the next day in new Nike Air Max 90s. Buy your own Pot Noodle then, mate! Right?’ Fitz laughed to himself, then noticed that everyone was staring at him. ‘Didn’t mean to interrupt. Back to you, Harry.’

  ‘Right, thanks for that, Fitz.’ Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘Getting into the Barn will literally be just the tip of the iceberg. We have plans for the section above ground but from what Bishop told me, there is an underground section that they affectionately refer to as “the Belly”. This is where they work on anything particularly nasty that they want to keep from prying eyes, so we can presume that this is where they are holding Boyd and Skye.’

  Harry pointed to a room at the rear of the 3D projection. ‘As we understand it, this room is empty apart from a single guard, who sits in a chair and watches the door like a hawk. To get into the Belly, we’ve got to get across that room and into that lift without being seen by the guard. Then, if by some miracle we find a way down into the Belly, we have no idea what the layout is, or what I’m walking into down there.’

  ‘But if you’re going in as Schmidt, they’ll let you walk straight through, surely?’ Azima looked at Harry puzzled.

  ‘Schmidt isn’t due until Friday – we’re going to hit the place tomorrow, when Ravensbrook is busy. We might be able to get past the front desk and into the Barn posing as Schmidt, but the Belly is highly restricted access; no one goes down there without His Lordship knowing about it. The minute I walk through that door and head towards the lift, that guard will be on their radio to Hornet and our plan is stuffed.’

  ‘So, we need to quietly take that guard out of circulation, without them raising the alarm.’ Fitz rubbed his face as his brain whirred.

  ‘How’s our fake hand coming along?’ Ophelia asked.

  ‘It’s good. I’m going with wax, so it’ll need some time to dry. I’ve got an idea for that guard too. Harry, have you got a spare pair of glasses I can borrow?’

  Harry raised his eyebrows suspiciously. ‘Perhaps. Will I get them back?’

  ‘Of course, they’ll be better than ever,’ Fitz said, as if he was insulted.

  Harry took a pair of metal framed spectacles out of his pocket and handed them to Fitz.

  ‘Perfect. Barney’s going to customise them for you,’ Fitz winked.

  ‘Why does that not fill me with confidence?’ Harry rolled his eyes. ‘So I’ll be going in, whilst you four run operations from the outside. As Barnaby explained, there’s no chance we can get a signal into or out of that place, which means the minute I step over the threshold, my communications will go dark. Now, we need to talk about a plan for when we come out. It would be lovely to think we can quietly slip out the front door, but it’s a pretty fair bet that we’ll have to make some noise and come out of there running for our lives.’

  A silence fell over the team. They all knew that there was a chance that Boyd and Skye wouldn’t be coming out of there in the same state as when they’d gone in.

  ‘This is going to work, isn’t it?’ Fitz asked no one in particular.

  ‘It has to,’ Azima said, her voice slightly shaky.

  Ophelia looked around the group. ‘Listen you lot,’ she said as she stepped to the head of the table. ‘I’ve spent a good deal of my life battling against the powerful and corrupt, and the game is always rigged; we never seem to get a fair fight. I look around this table and I couldn’t think of a better bunch to take these creatures on. Remember this: they won’t be ready for us, they won’t have ever seen anything like us and we’ve got Boyd and Skye on our side too. So let’s leave the brooding for another time, yes? We need to bring our people home.’

  They all nodded. Azima and Fitz did their best to hold in their emotions.

  ‘Oh, and don’t worry,’ Ophelia added with a smile. ‘I’ve had an idea for how to get us all away from that wretched place in one piece. You leave that with me.’

  What You Do Best

  Hornet was not a patient woman but, in some cases, she had to make an exception. One only got in to see Lord Ravensbrook when he was ready and not a moment before. So she stood in the hallway of Lockmead House and distracted herself by studying the huge paintings set in their heavy, gold frames, the dark, wooden antique furniture, and the enormous vases and ornaments that sat on top of them. Hornet had never been one for material possessions. She preferred power and had never needed money to get it. In her experience, fear had always been the best way to influenc
e any situation. But Lord Ravensbrook had been good to her and he had provided a purpose for her chilling talents, so she respected him more than anyone she had ever met. Still, she really didn’t like waiting.

  Knowles appeared and ushered her into a sitting room where His Lordship was sitting by a fire enjoying a glass of brandy. There were no lamps on, and the only light was the glow thrown out from the fireplace. Ravensbrook sat in a high-backed leather chair, swilling the brown liquid around in a glass so large, it resembled a fishbowl. He motioned for Hornet to sit in an identical chair opposite his own.

  ‘Van Cleef’s scientist chap has arrived?’ Ravensbrook asked.

  ‘Yes, safe and sound. We’ll collect him Friday morning.’

  ‘Fine. Let him be a tourist for a day or two. What about Martin?’

  ‘He’s in the East Wing. He was unharmed, just as Van Cleef said.’

  ‘Good, I want you to put him in with Boyd tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  Ravensbrook looked at Hornet; he didn’t like being questioned by his own people. ‘I think so.’

  ‘If I can speak with Boyd, I think I can bring him over to us if you’ll let me try.’

  Ravensbrook drained his glass and rested it on the arm of his chair. ‘I don’t believe you can; I think he’s got the beating of you. Somehow, by putting him into the world with only a soldier and an assassin for company, I believe we’ve created a stone-cold operator with a filthy temper. The lad is 15 years old and yet his ability to think through scenarios and equate outcomes is far beyond what your reports told me. I think it’s time you consider the fact that you completely underestimated him.’

  ‘But he isn’t heartless. I can play the part and tug at his emotions.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s a complex young man – all teenagers are – and you failed to factor that in.’