S*W*A*G*G 1, Spook

by Jill Marshall

  This time, they were only there to plunder the vault.

  ‘See? I knew I should have worn black tie,’ said Jack, gazing down at his neatly pressed jeans. ‘I’d have fitted in perfectly.’

  ‘The only thing you have to fit into is that bank vault with your enormous doggy noggin,’ snapped G-Mamma. ‘And then maybe after you’ve done that we’ll head to the kitchens and get some food.’

  Ah. She was hungry. There was nothing worse than a hungry G-Mamma.

  But Jack didn’t know this yet, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. Ever polite, though, he soon recovered and said amiably: ‘Good plan. I like food.’

  ‘We noticed,’ said G-Mamma, but then, she was hardly one to talk. ‘And I … quite like it too,’ she said after a moment. ‘And I might just be a little peckish which is why I’m a smidgeon on the irritable side. So let’s get this heist underway and then on to the important business.’

  ‘Very, very good plan,’ said Jack with a smile, so charming and sweet that even G-Mamma couldn’t stay mad at him.

  Waiting for the right moment to enter, Janey observed quietly as a black car decorated with flags pulled up near the house, followed by another. In fact, when she looked up along the street, a whole cavalcade of limousines was appearing, each one disgorging important-looking guests in evening dress who were all being funnelled through the vast front door into the party beyond.

  ‘Who are all these people?’ She zoomed in on a flag; obediently, the Gogs popped up a description of the country it belonged to. ‘They’re from Ecuador,’ she informed the others. ‘The second one is … Cayman Islands … and the one behind it is Brazil. Why are they all from other countries?’

  ‘I might happen to know that,’ said Jack. ‘My father told me about it. This area is embassy land.’ He pointed to the houses on the other side of the street, all enormous, and several with security guards talking into the cuffs of their jackets. ‘This single street probably represents twenty different countries.’

  ‘And they’re all going to this party.’ Janey checked her Ultra-Gogs again. ‘What’s the time?’

  Actually, she didn’t need to ask, because just at that moment a bell rang out across the city from a nearby church, chiming ten times.

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ they said together.

  ‘Something must be timed for ten so that the rooms all empty,’ said Janey, training her night-vision glasses on the security room in the basement once more. ‘Or everyone’s in one place. That way the coast will be clear to get into the vault.’

  As if they’d heard her words, the security guards in the cellar suddenly glanced up and nodded to each other. If only she could work out what they were saying! Then it occurred to her: she had new BATS hearing. She cocked one ear towards the distant house and closed her eyes so that she could concentrate.

  ‘… one for each country,’ the smaller guard was saying. She could hear the sound of keys jangling on a fob, then the solid thunk of a single key sliding into a lock and turning. ‘You take that tray up to Wentworth, and I’ll bring the other one.’

  Janey opened her eyes quickly, but it was too late to see what the guards were taking upstairs. Already, she could spot their outlines heading up the cellar steps, ghostly shapes marked out by the heat sensors in her Gogs. All her equipment really had been upgraded.

  G-Mamma gave her a nudge. ‘Action stations, Blonde?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve got about ten minutes, I reckon, although I doubt we’ll need that long. Jack, you’d better stand right behind this tree so nobody sees you change.’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Jack.

  It was a good job they’d already experienced what Jack looked like in his dog-god form, or they’d have completely given away their location by screaming. It was still quite unnerving to watch Jack change from the easy-going teenager he’d transformed into when they arrived at their target destination to an intimidating, canine-headed bruiser – but it did at least mean that, this time, they wouldn’t have to face any other intimidating bruisers like the many security guards in the vicinity.

  ‘Oh! Here,’ said Janey, whipping off her Ultra-Gogs and planting them on Jack’s long furry snout. ‘That’s the room you’re looking for.’

  ‘Great,’ replied Jack in his slightly deeper voice with was just a shade growlier, after squinting at the mini screens for a moment. ‘Would you mind taking the glasses off now? With my canine vision they make me a bit dizzy.’

  ‘Of course. I’d rather have them myself anyway.’ Janey parked her glasses back in place. ‘Ready?’

  Jack nodded. Now that they’d done this a couple of times, he no longer needed to clap his massive hands onto their shoulders. This time they simply stood side-by-side in front of Jack and waited for him to wrap his arms around them, and then the miraculous sliding began: straight through a limousine where the snoozing driver didn’t even stir; along the wall to the side passage where they passed through a padlocked iron gate as if it were air, then through brick walls, washing machines, racks of wine with not so much as a drop spilled, and suddenly into the security room. The faintest tingle of electricity simmered in Janey’s chest as they oozed through the computers, until a heartbeat later, they found themselves in the vault at the very centre of the basement.

  Jack let go of them, wrenching his feet out of the floor into which they’d accidentally become embedded. Then he closed his eyes for a moment and, with a sigh of relief, changed back into Boy Jack.

  ‘I must be relaxing more to be able to that. Oh, look at this! Well, that’s not what I expected,’ he whispered. ‘Our vault’s full of old portraits and dusty artefacts. This is sharp!’

  ‘You have a vault?’ said Janey with a laugh.

  Jack gave his little embarrassed shrug. ‘Yeah, well, we’re kind of posh. But it’s not like this. More of a museum, really.’

  They looked around them. It was, as Jack had stated, very sharp. There was nothing visible to the eye to begin with; it was as if they were standing inside a black cube of marble. Then, as they adjusted to the light, the walls became marked with fine grey lines and a grid of hundreds of rectangles appeared on each surface, including the floor and the ceiling.

  Janey peered closely at one of the rectangles.

  ‘They’re boxes,’ she said. ‘Each one is a separate box with something in it. I can see money in this one – piles of cash, in fact – and some … well, trainers, I think …’

  ‘Time’s a-ticking, boys and girls,’ said G-Mamma. ‘It’s nearly ten past ten. Which one has the goodies in it?’

  Fishing in the bib on the front of her decorator’s overalls, G-Mamma pulled out the blurred photograph of the sitar player wearing the ruby ring.

  Janey swallowed hard. ‘G-Mamma, there are hundreds of boxes in here. Even with the Ultra-Gogs, I won’t be able to locate one tiny ring in just a few minutes.’

  ‘How about you take two walls and I take the other two?’ said Jack, scrunching his eyes up until his ears turned black and furry and his alter-ego appeared. ‘I’ll just go in and have a rummage.’ And with that he stepped through the surface of the wall and disappeared inside the marble.

  ‘That might have triggered an alarm,’ cried G-Mamma. ‘They’ll be on us in seconds!’

  From the security room next door they could hear a distinct intermittent bleep that hadn’t been there before, and although the guards weren’t there at that moment, there was no doubt they’d be back very soon.

  ‘Hurry,’ said Janey. ‘You take the ceiling and floor. You’ve got Ultra-Gogs?’

  ‘Contact lenses. Better with my make-up.’ Her mentor blinked her painted eyelids a couple of times to activate the lenses, then dropped effortlessly to all fours like a ragdoll, scanning the boxes with occasional squeals. ‘Oo, Monroe memorabilia! Hey, your uncle had a watch just like that when he was a kid. Oh, nice!’

  Tuning her out, Janey concentrated on her own element of the mission. She peered into box after box but found nothing that looked
like jewellery, especially a ring. Frustration rising, she rushed along the wall, unable to see anything that fitted the picture they’d been given.

  To her surprise, however, in the corner of the room it appeared that many of the boxes had been knocked together to create a wardrobe-sized space. In it was the sitar, all glowing wood with a great onion bulb at its base and a fretboard that was almost as long as Janey was tall.

  ‘The instrument’s in here,’ she said to G-Mamma. ‘Maybe the ring’s inside it.’

  G-Mamma leapt to her feet. ‘Only one way to find out.

  She lifted Janey’s hand, complete with her spy Gauntlet, and squirted the index finger in the sitar’s direction. Smoky white gas poured out of the glove, settling over the black surface in a mist.

  ‘Punch it,’ said G-Mamma, so Janey balled her fist and slammed it into the box.

  It shattered like crystal.

  ‘Liquid nitrogen,’ explained the SPI:KE. ‘Liquid while in the Gauntlet, gas once it’s outside it, rapid freezing of whatever it lands on – so don’t split your glove, Blonde!’

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ said Janey, pulling out the Sitar and scouring it for signs of the ring. She shook it to see if it rattled; it simply vibrated gently in the vault, sending soothing guitar sounds around the room.

  Unfortunately, they weren’t the only sounds it created. Suddenly the beeping from next door elongated into one long blast of a horn before increasingly hideously into the siren scream of a fire-engine. Above and around them, the footsteps of several meaty security guards rained down on them.

  ‘We’re too late!’ hissed Janey. ‘The ring isn’t in the sitar, and we don’t have time to keep looking.’

  It was a terrible realisation. Her first mission in months, maybe even years, and she’d failed.

  ‘We have to go!’ She smacked on the wall where Jack had disappeared. ‘Jack, we have to—'

  At that exact moment, he emerged from the wall, brandishing a small velvet box.

  ‘I’ve got something! It was the only jewellery box in the whole place – all the rest of it was either porcelain objects like little statuettes and stuff, or necklaces laid out on pads. I haven’t looked in it yet, but—'

  ‘No time, Jack. The guards are coming.’

  It was worse than that, actually. The guards were all around them. They’d imagined that the only entrance was the one through the back of the security room, but what if it wasn’t? Shouts and the stamping heels of hard-soled boots were ringing out from behind each of the walls. She checked with her Gogs, and sure enough, the outlines of a dozen or more burly men radiated onto her mini screens. They were surrounded.

  ‘The only way is up,’ she said briskly, turning G-Mamma around so they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, ready for Jack to transport them.

  G-Mamma grabbed the sitar grimly.

  ‘I can’t do up.’ Jack sounded pretty bleak. ‘Only on stairs.’

  But luckily, Janey had thought of that already. ‘Okay. You do through, and I’ll do the up part.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Jack started to say. A crack of light from the nearby utility room was beginning to appear as the door opened from the outside.

  ‘Just be ready!’

  As Jack’s mighty hands curled around their upper arms, Janey leaned backwards against him, drew her knees up to her chest and – hoping desperately that her spy-buys all still worked in pretty much the same way as they used to – she slammed her feet down as hard as she could against the marble floor.

  As more light spilled out across the gloom of the vault, Jane Blonde’s Fleet-Feet burst into action with a bang like cannon-fire. She shot into the air with her SPI:KE at her side and her new ally behind her, and the three of them touched the ceiling, melted it, then vaporised the roof, insulation and floor above so that it closed seamlessly in their wake. In moments they were all tottering unsteadily in the downstairs bathroom of the enormous meringue of a house.

  Jack was staring at her, eyes wide. ‘That was … outstanding!’ he said with a wolfish grin.

  ‘Great teamwork,’ replied Janey, as pleased as he was at what they’d accomplished together. ‘Now let’s see if we got what we needed.’

  They all gazed at the neat leather box on Jack’s palm, and Janey held her breath as she opened it, awaiting the lustrous glint of ruby …

  But the box was empty.

  Their mission had bombed.

  Chapter 8 - A Ring of Truth

  Janey felt doubly despondent. First of all, they’d had one simple thing to achieve, and they hadn’t managed to do it. Secondly, Gideon Flynn was going to turn up expecting them to have the ring and help him with this condition, and they were going to let him down. For some reason, the second thing felt even worse than the failure to complete the mission…

  All at once, though, as Jack and G-Mamma discussed the issues of Jack-Training through a toilet and she realised they were planning to leave, Janey’s own spy instincts kicked in.

  ‘We’re not going yet,’ she said firmly. ‘We’ve got a mission to finish, and anyway, Jack won’t get the money to maintain his castle if we don’t provide the ring for Gideon Flynn.’

  Jack grinned. ‘True! No treats for Jacky-Boy without the ring, apparently.’

  ‘Besides,’ Janey said, picking up the ring box, ‘it doesn’t make sense. Why keep an empty ring box in a vault? The ring must usually be in it, and at the moment …’

  ‘Someone’s wearing it!’ Holding up her own hands which, despite the decorator’s outfit, were laden with outrageous jewellery, G-Mamma whooped. ‘Someone who likes to bling it up for a party! Brilliant, Blonde. We just have to mingle with the blingle until we spot it.’

  Janey laughed. ‘How? I’m in a spy-suit, Jack’s about a quarter dog, and you’re dressed in dungarees. It’s a very smart party! It’s not even as if there’s a shower curtain to disguise myself in.’ She knew this because she’d already looked, and while there was a shower in here it was built-in, with a glass screen.

  ‘All righty, Blondette. But you’re a spy, and sometimes spies have to do the obvious. You could hide in plain sight.’ G-Mamma looked her up and down, nodding. ‘Yep. If Jacky-Boy puts his floppy fair head back on, and you just waltz out of here, I don’t reckon anyone would know you weren’t the son and daughter of a diplomat. And who knows how they dress in say … Greenland?’

  ‘Oh! That’s brilliant!’ said Janey, although the thought of just marching out of the downstairs loo in her spy-suit caused her stomach to clench.

  ‘But what if somebody recognises you as a famous spy?’ Jack pointed to her outfit. ‘Or me, as Lord Bootle-Cadogan?’

  G-Mamma leapt up so quickly that her contact lens fell out. ‘Even more brilliant, Jack! You could just introduce yourself as Lord Booty-Delicious, and Janey as your cousin or your plus one, and even if they check they won’t find anything suspicious because you’re telling the truth.’ She goggled at them as if nobody had ever thought of telling the truth before.

  ‘What’s a plus one?’ Janey had a horrible feeling she knew the answer, but held her breath anyway.

  ‘A date for a posh party,’ said G-Mamma.

  Jack checked his hairy face in bathroom cabinet, watching Janey over his shoulder. ‘It sounds like the easiest solution, and of course we’ll have to shake everyone’s hand so we can check for the ring.’

  And so it was decided, though suddenly Janey wished she’d just insisted that they go home. As Jack concentrated on transforming into Lord BC of Lowmount, she stared in the mirror and tried to do something different with her hair. It was no use – whatever magic the Wower had wrought meant her ponytail insisted on staying in a long wavy side-pony that trailed almost to her waist at the front.

  ‘I look ridiculous,’ she muttered.

  ‘You’re perfect,’ Jack said with his normal teenager mouth as he pulled her hand through his arm. ‘Ready, Plus One?’

  She wasn’t really, but on the other hand, it would be interesting to see ju
st what kind of party this was. There was no danger of anyone recognising her, as she was sure she’d de-spied everyone in the spy world apart from G-Mamma. She could do this as her new self – Jane Blonder - for her new client, Mr Flynn.

  Taking a deep breath, she checked through her Gogs for by-standers on the other side of the cloakroom door, confirmed there weren’t any, then pushed it open. She and Jack moved along the corridor, grabbed some empty glasses from a nearby table, and stepped into the throng. What G-Mamma was going to do, she wasn’t sure – but then she turned around to see her SPI:KE sticking up a ‘WET PAINT’ sign at the cloakroom door, and standing before it in her painting gear in case anyone didn’t quite believe it.

  Through the arm he’d clutched with his own, Janey could feel that Jack’s heart was pounding practically out of his chest. ‘Always hated this fancy stuff,’ he moaned out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Wish I was in black tie.’

  ‘You look fine. Think how Prince Harry dresses. He’s not in a suit all the time.’

  ‘True. And I know him and William, sort of, so … well, here goes.’

  And with that, Jack tightened his grip on her arm and steered her towards the nearest group of dignitaries.

  ‘Evening,’ he said smoothly, pumping the hand of a gentleman that Janey recognised as the man from the Ecuadorian limousine. ‘Lord Bootle-Cadogan. This is my friend, Jane Blon … Brown.’

  The man positively simpered. ‘Lord Bootle-Cadogan; I knew your father. Kept very fine horses. So sorry to hear of your loss.’

  Jack gulped ominously. ‘You’re most kind.’

  ‘Do send my condolences to your mother. From Carlos Litardo - we were at Oxford together.’

  ‘I will, Senor Litardo. Thank you.’

  Jack made to move away as they’d already had time to check that nobody nearby was wearing an ostentatious ruby ring, but Senor Litardo grabbed Janey by her free hand.

  ‘And Miss Blon-Brown, are your family into polo too?’ His smile was like an oil slick spreading across his face. ‘We have fabulous horses in Ecuador – as you shall see in the World Community Games!’