The Hollywood Mission

by Deborah Abela

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Max Remy Superspy 04: The Hollywood Mission

  ePub ISBN 9781742745091

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  http://www.randomhouse.com.au

  Sydney New York Toronto

  London Auckland Johannesburg

  First published in 2003

  Text copyright © Deborah Abela 2003

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Abela, Deborah.

  Max Remy super spy: the hollywood mission.

  For children aged 9+.

  ISBN 978 1 74051 912 0.

  ISBN 1 74051 859 4.

  1. Spies - Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  A823.4

  Photograph of the author by Todd Decker

  Cover and internal illustrations by Jobi Murphy

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1: A Race with Death and a Moment of Terror

  Chapter 2: A Dangerous Discovery

  Chapter 3: The Bride of Frankenstein in Mindawarra

  Chapter 4: A Secret Lab and a Journey through Time

  Chapter 5: A Bad Case of Dinosaur Diarrhoea

  Chapter 6: An Important Phone Call

  Chapter 7: Bon Voyage

  Chapter 8: Desert Deathtrap and a Long-awaited Reunion

  Chapter 9: A Meeting and a Pink Nightmare

  Chapter 10: A High Class Restaurant and an Unexpected Visitor

  Chapter 11: Action!

  Chapter 12: A Chilly Invitation and a Surprise Mission

  Chapter 13: An Unwelcome Reappearance and a High-speed Snow Chase

  Chapter 14: A Quiet Chat and Some News about the Past

  Chapter 15: An Angry Outburst and a Secret Plot Revealed

  Chapter 16: A Maritime Disaster and an Ominous Warning

  Chapter 17: A Terrible Discovery

  Chapter 18: A Bad Mood and a Deathly Fall

  Chapter 19: A Mission through Time

  Chapter 20: A Final Rescue

  Chapter 21: A Dressing Down and a Warning from Spyforce

  Chapter 22: A Hard Goodbye

  About the Author

  Max Remy Series

  Jasper Zammit Series

  For Brian and Shirley Decker

  The steep, snow-wrapped mountain plunged before her like a giant slide to white oblivion. A violent blizzard filled the skies and the risk of death was as real as the knife-edged cold filling the air. As Max Remy catapulted on her skis through this frozen wilderness, a crushing wind tore at the forest which swayed and lurched on either side of her. Then, in all this whitened chaos, Max was dealt her first blow.

  A helicopter rose from the heart of the forest, its rotor blades creating an icy sprawl that left her momentarily blinded. One wrong move at this speed and Max knew she faced certain and instant death.

  She raced through the storm, maintaining her balance, with the helicopter expertly following her every move as she navigated her way around protruding rocks as dangerous as landmines. She’d been on far more dangerous missions than this and some chopper pilot on a thrill ride wasn’t going to stop her now.

  That is, until she came to Devil’s Run.

  Devil’s Run was a slice of the mountain that fingered into a narrow ledge overlooking a jagged, rock-filled chasm. If she went over the edge, search parties wouldn’t be sent out. Bodies that fell into Devil’s Run were never found.

  She tried to ski away from the edge just as a rabbit hopped in front of her. In an instant she swerved, avoiding the furry animal and earning herself a place on the powdery edge of the cliff. The hungry mouth of the chasm opened up below her. She fought against the image of death that filled her mind and regained her composure as the chopper moved into position for a final swoop.

  ‘So, that’s how you want to play,’ Max muttered through clenched teeth.

  Now the pilot would make his move. If he’d come to kill her it would not take long.

  Flurries of snow swept up from the chasm in waves, wanting to drag Max into its depths. She tried to pull away from the edge but the helicopter forced her even closer.

  Then her fate took a fiendish turn. A man sitting next to the pilot pulled out a Stun Blaster and aimed it straight at her.

  Max glimpsed the immobilising device and knew there was little chance of evading its life-sucking punishment. Her skis sent clumps of snow over the cliff beside her. If she didn’t think fast she’d soon follow. Then she had it. A cunning plan that would end her enemy’s menacing flight. A foolproof idea that

  ‘Max! Let me in.’

  Max jumped in her seat, her fingers plunging across the keyboard. She stared at the screen of her computer as snow billowed from Devil’s Run where she’d just fallen to her death. Why did her mother instinctively know the worst times to interrupt her? It was as if she had some kind of Max Anti-Fun radar.

  ‘Phone for you, sweetie. And why do you always lock this door?’

  It was purely for health reasons. If her mother had unrestricted access to her room, Max stood a good chance of her brain exploding. She turned back to the computer.

  ‘Gotta go, Linden. I’ve got my own forces of evil to deal with.’

  Linden’s face appeared in the corner of Max’s screen, beaming in from his home in Mindawarra. ‘Too bad.’ He smiled victoriously. ‘Who’d have thought after all that you’d end up as a permanent ice block.’

  ‘You were about to be trounced by my great comeback plan. That is, until the abominable snow woman knocked on my door. See you on the weekend.’

  ‘Yeah. We’ll see if those landings of yours have finally been sorted out,’ Linden smirked.

  Max had this unfortunate knack of messy landings whenever she used the Time and Space Machine. She’d landed in garbage compactors, pig troughs, compost bins and freshly laid cat poo. Ben and Francis promised they’d fix the problem and this weekend she was going back to Mindawarra to try it out.

  ‘See ya then,’ Max said coolly, but in reality she missed the farm and couldn’t wait to go back.

  She shut down the Spyforce Ski Run game that they’d been playing. There were lots of great things about being part of Spyforce and access to virtual spy missions on their computers was definitely one of them. The games weren’t as good as the simulation chambers in the Spyforce Training Centres, but they were still a great way to help Max forget she shared her regular life with the Fun Terminator.

  ‘Quickly now.’

  Max followed her mother to the hall, and as Max picked up the phone, she noticed her mother hovering nearby displaying a bad case of looking obvious while trying to listen in. Max took the phone to the lounge room and closed the door.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘So how about it? Are you
in?’ Max’s dad spoke to his daughter from the other side of the world.

  There was a pause as the scowl on Max’s face was replaced with an enormous grin. ‘I … that’d be … um …’ she stammered.

  ‘Is that a yes?’ Her dad lived in America with his new wife and had just asked her to visit.

  ‘Yes!’ Max finally managed. She was finding it hard to speak, when all she really wanted to do was run into the middle of the street and yell, ‘My dad wants me to visit him in America!’

  ‘I’ve been trying to come out since last Christmas but every time it seems possible, I get more work, so I thought the best solution was for you to come here.’

  Max felt so light with happiness it was as if she was floating around the room. Until she remembered a small problem and came crashing down.

  ‘Have you asked Mum?’

  ‘Not yet. I wanted to speak with you first.’

  ‘Oh.’ Suddenly Max’s rose-coloured world became murky grey.

  ‘Don’t worry, Max. Leave everything to me.’

  She wanted to believe him but after eleven years of sharing the same piece of loony land with her mother, she knew she was going to be hard to convince.

  ‘Put your mum on and we’ll sign off on this deal.’

  Max said goodbye and trudged to the lounge room door. When she pulled it open she faced the giant ear of her mother.

  ‘I was listening for termites, sweetie.’ Her mother fixed her hair in an attempt not to look awkward, which made her look even more awkward. ‘Does your father want to talk to me?’ she asked in a girlie voice.

  Max handed over the phone while trying to find even a slight resemblance between her and the woman people said was her mother.

  Her mother’s voice danced across the tiles and marble surfaces of the kitchen. Whenever she spoke to Max’s dad, she put on her Everything’s Perfect voice. Max went to the lounge room to wait for the verdict.

  After what felt like hours, Max heard her mother say goodbye. She raced to the kitchen to find her humming and preparing dinner. Something wasn’t right. She never hummed and usually after long conversations with Max’s dad, she walked around clanging everything and wore a face that had just sucked a lemon. This time her mother was happy and any time that happened, it usually meant bad news for Max.

  ‘Everything alright, Mum?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘Everything alright?’ her mum replied.

  ‘Yeah. You seem a little strange.’ Max watched as her mother polished a tomato so hard she was in danger of wearing it out.

  ‘A little strange?’

  ‘Yeah, is everything alright?’

  ‘Of course everything’s alright.’

  Now Max was really worried. ‘Could you stop repeating everything I say?’

  ‘I’m not repeating everything you … sorry. Everything’s fine.’

  This was how life was with her mother. Max felt as if she was on a stretching rack and her mother was enjoying every second of torturing her.

  Just then the doorbell rang.

  ‘Oh.’ Her mother walked towards the front door. ‘And Aidan will be joining us.’

  What? Why did her mother never tell Max when she’d invited people over? And when were they supposed to talk about what her dad had said? Max bit into a carrot as she prepared to face another painful evening with her mother and her try-hard boyfriend.

  Over dinner, the only sound accompanying the clinking of cutlery against plates was the sound of whales moaning on the stereo. Her mum found it relaxing. Max just wanted to scream. Eventually she couldn’t take it any longer.

  ‘Mum, I know what Dad asked you and I’m almost twelve years old and I don’t think it’s right that you treat me like a kid when I’m almost not a kid anymore and anyway I can make up my own mind about what’s good for me and …’

  ‘Max,’ her mother interrupted in a caramelly sweet voice. ‘There’s something I’d like to tell you.’ She looked across at Aidan, who was smiling like a kid about to meet Santa. ‘Aidan and I are getting married.’

  Wham! Max felt the ground quake beneath her, like Dorothy when her house was sucked up by the tornado on her way to Oz. Things were suddenly spinning out of control and if they didn’t stop soon, her stomach and everything in it was going to leap out of her mouth all over everyone. Her mother was talking so fast her lips were beginning to blur. Max heard none of it. It was as though someone had turned down the volume on her life, which had changed from barely tolerable into a twisting, tortuous nightmare.

  She saw events unfold before her. Her mother would be wearing a hideous designer dress that would spill out from a gold-encrusted horse drawn carriage. The church would be filled with stylish people she didn’t know sitting listening to soppy reject ’80s music while flowers bloomed out of the seats like an overgrown jungle. The wedding party, of which Max would be a member, would be dragged into a hairdressing salon to be tugged, pruned and curled only to come out looking like extras from a horror movie. And she’d be forced to wear a dress! She could see herself now, marching down the aisle puffed up like a chiffon-covered blimp.

  She couldn’t let it happen. She’d been patient with this Aidan business long enough, but as she took a deep breath to tell them exactly what she thought, a clump of alfalfa was sucked into her windpipe.

  ‘Max?’

  Even though Max couldn’t breathe it was a relief that her mother had finally stopped talking. Max’s face became the colour of an eggplant as air struggled to pass the grassy salad.

  ‘Aidan! Quick, do something!’

  Soon Max stopped being able to gasp at all. Then something weird happened. She felt as if she was floating, not like when she was on the phone floating, but really floating. She rose above her choking body as if it belonged to someone else. The horror of being Aidan’s stepdaughter suddenly became someone else’s problem and she felt instantly calm, like those stories about people who have near-death experiences and float away from their bodies towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

  But are then forcefully jerked back.

  Max’s eyes flung open as the shining teeth and bulging lips of Aidan came straight for her.

  ‘Don’t come any closer,’ Max wheezed at Aidan’s reckless attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She’d left the floating sensation and landed back in the doom of her mother’s impending marriage.

  She was lying on the floor, covered in alfalfa, sun-dried tomatoes and seaweed.

  ‘But what about Dad?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with your dad, sweetie,’ her mother said calmly, trying to pretend her only child hadn’t nearly choked to death.

  ‘You can’t just replace him like that.’ Max sat up and pulled a piece of spinach from her ear. ‘I already have a father and I’m not going to call him Dad,’ she managed, not sure if she wanted to yell or cry.

  ‘You don’t have to, sweetie …’

  But Max didn’t wait to hear the rest. She’d had enough for tonight and was heading as far away from the happy couple as possible.

  She climbed the stairs to her room and locked the door against the whole idea, desperately wanting to turn back time so that her mother’s news had never happened. As she lay on her bed clutching her pillow against her sore throat, she slowly saw the best day of her life turn into the worst. From now on her life was as good as over.

  After a night filled with dreams of headless horsemen steering out-of-control bridal carriages and wedding cakes crammed with spiders, Max slumped through the next day at school with a heavy dose of sleep deprivation.

  Toby Jennings saw her sitting by herself during recess and, not wanting to waste a perfect opportunity to rile her, got ready for a little entertainment.

  ‘Sitting with all your friends, Max?’ Sniggers rose behind him.

  Usually this would be enough to get Max started on her own fiery comebacks, but instead she kept focusing on an ant crawling over her shoe. Not only that, after saying nothing she got up and walked aw
ay.

  Toby and his friends stared. It was the first time since Toby had known Max that she hadn’t bitten back when he’d tried to provoke her.

  Later, in class, he tried again.

  ‘Max?’ he leaned in and whispered. ‘There’s an express delivery at the school office. That brain you ordered must finally be here.’

  Two Toby goons sitting in front of them splurted giggles into their chests.

  Max stared at the maths book she was doodling on and said nothing.

  Toby gave it another shot. ‘Or maybe it’s that moneyback guarantee personality you bought.’ He smiled but Max kept on doodling as if she hadn’t heard him.

  Toby wasn’t going to give up. ‘Or maybe it’s that …’

  ‘What?’ Max looked up and noticed Toby had been talking to her.

  ‘Max Remy, apparently what you have to say to Toby Jennings is infinitely more interesting than what we’re talking about.’ Mr Fayoud’s eyebrows were zigzagging all over his face like the burning fuse on a stick of dynamite.

  Toby smirked.

  ‘No, Mr Fayoud. Sorry,’ Max muttered.

  And that was it. No blaming. No yelling. Nothing.

  Toby was really worried now. If Max stopped reacting to his teasing, school wasn’t going to be half as much fun. Something had to be done.

  At lunchtime, he followed her as she made her way to the far end of the playground. She sat on a bench beneath tall trees on the other side of the toilet block and took out her lunchbox. Toby hid beside the toilets and watched her closely.

  Max bit into a Japanese nori roll as her eyes darted around the playground, making sure she wasn’t being watched. Then she picked up her bag and pulled out her palm computer.