Boyd jumped to his feet and leapt the sofa. He was across the room and heading towards Hornet before Martin could stop him. Hornet didn’t even blink and the thin smile remained in place despite Boyd lunging towards her.
Just as he was about to reach her, two guards stepped through the door, batons raised. As Boyd’s momentum carried him forward, they stepped in front of Hornet and slammed their fingers on the buttons that triggered the electrical charge. The weapons hit Boyd directly in the chest and each one kicked 15 volts of electricity into him. It was like running at full speed into a charging bull. Boyd’s feet flew out from under him and he landed heavily on his back, cracking his head on the floor.
‘Get him up,’ Hornet said as she turned and left the room.
The two guards went to move him.
‘Leave him,’ Martin ordered, his voice laced with menace. The two guards stopped in their tracks. ‘You get the doors, I’ll carry him.’
As Martin lowered Boyd down onto his bed, the guards stood in the doorway. Boyd’s eyes flickered as he started to come around, then he scrunched them up as the signals of pain shot all around his body.
‘Steady,’ Martin said with care. ‘I’d stay off your feet for a little while. You’ve taken a pretty hard bang to the head.’
Boyd felt Martin put something in his hand. It was cold and metallic, sharp in places; it felt like a bracelet. Martin held Boyd’s hand where it was and folded it over the object; he was telling Boyd not to look at whatever it was until they were gone. Then he turned and walked to the door. He stopped and put his hand on the wall, tapping his fingers. ‘Take your time, I’ll be here, and we can talk when you’re ready.’
The door closed. Boyd waited for a moment. He hadn’t heard the now-familiar click; the door hadn’t locked. He lifted his head slowly and brought himself up into a sitting position. Martin had been right: Boyd had come down hard on the floor of the lounge and his head was throbbing. He allowed his eyes to settle, the world slowly crept back into focus and he looked towards the door. Boyd realised that Martin hadn’t been tapping his fingers on the wall as he spoke, he must have been tapping an override code into the door lock to disable it. Boyd opened his hand and looked down at the object Martin had given him – an old digital watch from the 1980s.
Before Hornet had come back to the lounge, Martin had told Boyd about Operation Hurricane and how on the night that it all burnt down, he had followed Erica Adler’s instructions to the letter. She had wanted him to make sure the Trinity Guild had her diary, which detailed her progress and explained how she had tested her research on herself. But the diary was fake, she had written it to ensure Boyd’s safety. So long as Ravensbrook and the Trinity Guild believed that she was the key to Hurricane, then they would never harm Boyd because they needed him to lure her out of hiding.
Boyd let everything sink in for a moment. He had desperately wanted to ask if Martin knew where his mother was, but somewhere inside him, he was petrified that she wasn’t alive and he wasn’t ready to hear that yet; not now he had a tiny shred of hope.
‘I don’t understand how you suddenly stopped doing the only thing you’d ever known to help a woman who would put you in so much danger. It doesn’t make sense.’
Martin had nodded in agreement.
‘I spent over a year as your mother’s security detail. She was like no one I had ever met: kind, thoughtful and she seemed to know exactly what I was thinking or feeling before I knew it myself. She became my best friend.’
Boyd had watched as Martin’s mind wandered and he’d waited for him to snap back to the story. Then he’d realised he had never seen Martin’s eyes shine like they were then: he was lost in a real memory, truly happy.
‘She was the first person in my life to tell me I had a choice – I didn’t just have to follow orders. Erica said that whichever path I chose, it would change my life, and nothing would ever be the same again. It’s the same for you now, Boyd. Nothing is stopping you from working with these people and becoming rich and powerful beyond your dreams. But in the end, you would have to be able to justify your actions, to be able to look at yourself in the mirror. Ravensbrook, Hornet and the Trinity Guild will never give up; they won’t stop hunting your mother or chasing the truth behind Hurricane and they will cut down anyone in their way. If you go against them, it will make the last week seem like a walk in the park; it will mean the end of just being a kid, of everything you know. No teachers to tell you what to do and no parents to tell you where to be; you’d be making decisions that result in whether people live or die and you’d have to live with the consequences. Are you ready for that?’
It was at this point that Hornet had returned and interrupted them, so Boyd never had a chance to answer, although he wasn’t sure that Martin expected him to. Boyd hadn’t felt a shred of genuine anger towards Hornet when he charged her; he was just putting on a show. It was best that she continued to underestimate him, then he’d have two things in his favour. The other one being that he was fairly certain now that he could rely on Martin’s help.
He fastened the watch around his wrist and slid his feet onto the ground. It was time to find out just how exceptional he really was.
A Great Day for Rock ‘n’ Roll
Harry had watched the black Range Rover arrive a while ago. Now he sat in his car, desperately hoping that whoever was behind the tinted glass wasn’t planning on staying at the Barn too long; Section X had banked on the place being mostly empty. Finally, at almost 4pm, just as it was getting to the point where they would have to delay the operation, he saw the sleek 4x4 drive away from the Barn and head up towards the Lockmead estate. Harry turned the wheel and guided the car out of the trees.
It wasn’t long before he was pulling into the car park. He reversed into a space so that the next time he got behind the wheel, the car would be facing front and ready to go. He climbed out and crunched across the gravel pathway towards the entrance to the Barn. His walk had a little more sway to it than usual. This was because underneath his smart grey suit was a fake stomach that moved along with his steps, just like a real paunch.
Harry looked up at the building. Fitz had commented that it looked like half a toilet roll tube painted silver, and he wasn’t far wrong. But then, if you were going to build a facility dedicated to atrocious experimentation on children with the sole aim to create a power that could take over the world, it was probably best to make sure it doesn’t attract any undue attention.
He noticed a sound as if a swarm of bees were about to burst into view, then remembered it was the buzz of the bikes and cars at SpeedFest. He smiled to himself, knowing that Lord Ravensbrook would be busy parading his carefully sculpted public persona whilst the Toy Department were stealing his prize asset from right under his nose.
Just like every operation he had ever been on, Harry felt a fizz of excitement mixed with a bite of anxiety. He had lost count of the number of missions he had been on, but it wasn’t lost on him that this one was quite extraordinary; he had never been part of anything with stakes this high. Just before he got to the end of the pathway, Harry quietly said the code words he had been given on his first mission and since then he had used them before stepping over the threshold to begin every mission as his good luck mantra: ‘This is Four, it looks like a great day for rock ‘n’ roll.’
‘Receiving X-Four. Rock ‘n’ Roll, affirmative,’ Ophelia replied in his ear.
Harry reached into his pocket and put on the glasses Fitz had given back to him. He opened the door and walked into the cool, air-conditioned foyer of the Barn.
The Barn
‘We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow,’ the guard said slowly.
Harry had entered the foyer and made straight for the security office on the right-hand side. There were two guards, both with biceps and chests that were bursting through their black uniforms. The one talking to Harry had a neatly trimmed little beard, the other seemed completely unaware Harry was even in the building as he st
ared at a monitor, wearing large black headphones and blasting a gang of marauding zombies. Next to the office, directly to Harry’s left was what looked like a set of revolving doors inside a black pod, but Harry was well aware that this was much more than just a set of doors. The two guards were behind a panel of clear plastic set into the silver wall.
‘When you were expecting my arrival is of zero consequence to me,’ Harry replied in German-accented English. His tone was impatient and clipped. ‘I am here now so you will kindly let me in, or I will leave and return to my home. Then I will tell Lord Ravensbrook and his associates that you sent me away.’ Harry leant on the glass. ‘This will make you very popular, I should imagine.’
He leant back and took out his phone to make a call.
‘Oh no, sir. Excuse me.’ The guard stood up and began to gesture. ‘They should have told you; you should leave that outside. We don’t allow any phones into the building.’
Harry lowered the phone, shaking his head. ‘Are you making jokes with me now? First I can’t get in to start my work and now I can’t have my phone?’
‘I apologise, sir. They just aren’t allowed. We can keep it here for you.’
Harry threw the phone into a small silver drawer under the glass window. The guard pulled the drawer from his side and took out the phone.
‘I’ll keep it right here, on my desk. I promise.’ The guard placed the phone down. His colleague looked at it and then at Harry, then went back to killing a zombie with a brick.
‘So, make your choice. Will you allow me to enter? Or are you perhaps looking for a career change?’
The guard raised his hands. Thin beads of sweat were beginning to form on his forehead and top lip. ‘No, of course, you can come in!’ The guard glanced down at the monitor next to him. ‘It seems we do have your biometric data on file, so in this case, I am willing to make an exception.’
Harry kept his stern demeanour and tried not to look quite as happy as he felt. ‘This “exception” is the smart decision.’ He picked up his thin briefcase. ‘Congratulations, you won’t be getting fired today.’ He nodded to the guard.
‘Please enter the pod, pop your bag onto the conveyor belt, say your name, then place your hand into the cradle. Once again, I apologise for any confusion. Is there anything else I can do?’
‘You have done enough, I think.’
Harry turned left, took two steps and entered the black pod. The semi-circular door hissed to a close around him. That was stage one complete, and from here on, he was relying on Fitz’s new toys to get him the rest of the way.
He placed his bag onto the conveyor belt to his right and watched as it disappeared into the scanner. It didn’t hold anything that might raise suspicion, so there was absolutely no reason why it wouldn’t be waiting for him on the other side. Harry removed his glasses and was glad to notice that his hands were steady as a rock. On the left arm of the frame was a small button hidden in the logo of the manufacturer where Fitz had installed a playback device. In the right arm was a tiny, high-definition speaker. Harry held the frames up so they were level with the microphone in front of him and pressed the button with his fingernail.
‘Erlich Schmidt.’ The voice recording that Fitz and Azima had captured on Baker Street played out so crisp and clear, it was almost as if the German scientist was in the pod with Harry.
After a second, the circle around the microphone went green.
Next, Harry undid the button on his suit jacket, opened his shirt and pushed his hand inside. His new belly was actually a padded, flesh-coloured bag that was strapped around his middle. This meant that the team didn’t have to worry about smuggling in certain toys via the briefcase. Harry could slip past security wearing all his essentials around his waist, and to the outside world, he simply looked like a man who wasn’t afraid to skip a meal.
Very slowly and carefully, Harry pulled a perfect wax model of Erlich Schmidt’s right hand out from under his shirt. He lined it up and placed it on the scanner, then held his breath. If this didn’t work, Harry would not be leaving the Barn on his own two legs. Section X wouldn’t know anything had gone wrong until he didn’t make the rendezvous in an hour and by then, goodness knows what the Guild could have done to him.
The scanner closed around the hand. Harry held onto the solid wrist section that Fitz had built out of plastic and held his breath. The light around the scanner went red and the machine fired out a loud barking noise – strike one. The cover retracted and Harry lifted the hand up. There was no damage, nothing stuck to the wax, so why hadn’t it worked? He replaced it on the scanner and waited. The cover sprung up and over the hand and Harry felt his heart in his mouth. ‘Come on, play nice,’ he said to himself, his right leg starting to twitch.
He quickly assessed his options for getting out of this should the wax hand not work a second time. There was only one option as far as he could see it, he would have to rely on bluff and bluster. Just as he was about to start banging on the pod and complaining that the stupid English facility had malfunctioned, the light around the scanner went green and he heard a satisfying ‘BING!’ The curved door in front of him slid back and Harry gratefully stepped through, into the windowless corridors of the Barn. To his right, sitting on the conveyor belt was his bag. He collected it, stuffed the hand back into the pouch around his waist and moved quickly. Checking his watch, he noted it was 4:24pm. He had lost valuable time and the truth of it was, the toughest tests were all ahead of him.
The corridor ran through the centre of the building, between small, windowless offices on both sides. When Harry reached the end, he was faced with a kitchen and a store cupboard, and the only way to turn was left. He followed the corridor and ended up around the back of the kitchen and store cupboard. Now he was at the far end of the Barn and there, in the middle of the back wall, was a door with a small window, just as Bishop had described and exactly as it was on the plans. Harry stopped. He didn’t need to look through it, he knew what was beyond this: the security room for the Belly.
He ducked down, shuffled under the window, then he turned right and tucked himself down around the corner in the dead-end of the corridor, safely out of sight. Harry lifted his shoulders and reached again into the pouch around his waist. He took out a small plastic case, popped it open and looked inside at the tiny radio-controlled car that Fitz had given him. It looked just like a toy car, except it had much bigger wheels. Harry then pulled aside the sole of his shoe and took out a silver cylinder around the size of a pen lid. He gently pressed the cylinder down into the slot on the car’s roof until it clicked into place. He slid the sole of his shoe back on as he looked out around the corner and took a moment to listen for any movement; there was nothing, not a sound. The place was almost empty, just as they had suspected it would be.
He made his way to the door with the small window, took out his Parker pen and pulled the top off. Inside was a small mirror on an extending stick. He held it up to the window, steadied the mirror and looked carefully at the reflection. The room wasn’t very long, but it was the entire width of the building with a set of lift doors at the opposite end. It was completely empty, except for two things: at the far end next to the lift was a chair and sat on it was a guard, who was fast asleep.
‘Okay Fitz,’ Harry thought to himself. ‘Time to see what you’re made of.’
He reached for the door handle and slowly turned it.
Burn Baby Burn
Martin left Boyd and went straight to the large laboratory stretching all along the back of the Belly. He had only been in here once before, and although he had never seen what they had done to the children they took from the streets, he had heard the rumours. He had also heard the excuses – that these kids had no family to miss them, and the only future they would have had would be pick-pocketing at train stations, working for drug-dealers and sleeping rough. He didn’t believe that was any reason to snatch the life away from a child, but he hated himself for not doing anything about it. He had
simply chosen not to listen, to ignore the fact that he worked for tyrants; and just because he hadn’t witnessed the pain and grief they had caused, it didn’t make him innocent and it no longer eased his conscience.
Martin had helped take care of Boyd from the moment he was born. He looked after him while Erica worked and when he had brought him back to Lockmead, Boyd was still just a baby. The people at the Belly had noticed that as he grew, the boy felt safe with Martin around. When the suggestion was made that Martin take Boyd and set up home with him, that had been fine with Martin. What better way to keep his promise to Erica than to actually raise Boyd himself?
Martin had tried everything to break down the barriers that stood between him and Boyd, but nothing had worked. The fact that most of the walls between them were of his own making didn’t help. Martin had told Boyd the truth: he’d always had to live with the knowledge in the back of his mind that his job was to protect Boyd, but he knew that one day he would probably lose him to someone else. Because of this, because he had protected himself and kept his distance, Boyd had been cast in the same mould. He had grown into a cold, difficult young man who found it almost impossible to trust anyone. But now Martin had a chance to change the future for them both and he wasn’t going to fail Erica again.
Inside the labs, they used secure plastic chambers to work on minerals and rock samples that they couldn’t expose to oxygen; he had never asked why and he didn’t much care. What he did know was that these chambers were like big plastic bags, and to get rid of the normal air you would find in any room, they first introduce nitrogen and then a small amount of hydrogen. Martin wasn’t a scientist, but he knew there was a reason why they did this in a specific order. If he didn’t remove the oxygen from the six plastic chambers first, if he skipped the nitrogen and just pumped them full of hydrogen, he was pretty certain the result would be explosive.
Operation Hurricane: The Evan Boyd Adventures #1 Page 26