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

by Jill Marshall

  It was, Janey realised, really clever.

  And also completely unacceptable.

  That was why Vance Kettering and Karen Fallows hadn’t been allowed to come to Kazakhstan. It wasn’t their age, it was their eyes rejecting the implant. ‘Oh! Help!’ That was what the poor lady in the cell had meant … and the man at the HOST hospital. They were being imprisoned like lab rats.

  There was less than half an hour to go. She had to stop the Games.

  But then a muscle-bound guard stepped out in front of her and struck her on the temple with an elbow. Her vision darkened and flickered, but not before she’d seen G-Mamma toppled by a HOST guard with a Taser. As for Jack, Tilly and Stein, she had no idea if they’d even made it out of the Stadium.

  She’d failed completely. Failed to save the world. She’d even failed to save Gideon Flynn.

  And that was her last thought as her knees gave out beneath her and she crashed to the floor, although she could have sworn that she heard a low voice whisper in her ear. ‘Don’t give up, Blonde. Don’t.’

  Chapter 22 - What’s in a Name

  She opened her eyes with a jump when someone smacked her across the face.

  ‘Finally!’ said Matilda Peppercorn, her hair standing out in a steely halo as she leaned over Janey’s prone body. ‘That’s the fourth time I’ve had to slap you. And I don’t usually do slapping, only punching.’

  ‘I’m so glad you didn’t punch me,’ said Janey with a wince.

  ‘Well, I offered, but they thought I might knock you out again.’ She gestured to Jack and Stein who were hovering above her shoulders, both frowning with concern. ‘Okay, back off, Creepy and Creepier. She’s awake now.’

  ‘Forsooth, the ruby doth have – ahem, does have - a strange chemical make-up,’ said Stein in excitement. He scratched Tilly’s leather band down a nearby window, and they all watched as a streak of red snaked across the pane. ‘A genuine ruby would not do that. This has been alchemically created. Gadzooks, this is all magnificently interesting!’

  Janey sat up slowly, feeling tentatively for any parts that might hurt. She was sore all over, and her temple throbbed, but it was nothing that a Wower wouldn’t be able to sort out – if they ever got out of here.

  She glanced at Tilly’s wrist where the bracelet had been. ‘How did you get it off?’

  ‘Dogboy chewed it off,’ said Tilly a shudder. ‘Can’t tell you how many kinds of gross that was.’

  Jack held up his hands, which were currently normal sized to match his normal teenage boy appearance. ‘No, no, please don’t thank me. It was no sacrifice at all to have to get that close to your arm even though you reek of cat.’

  ‘You reek of dog,’ replied Tilly.

  ‘Do not.’

  ‘Do too.’

  Stein was watching them volley insults at each other as if he were a spectator at a tennis match. ‘La, are they not fascinating?’ he said to Janey. ‘The experiments I could do!’

  She was almost tempted to let him, but instead she asked them politely to stop fighting as she sized up their surroundings.

  They appeared to be in a sealed glass room at the back of some kind of mission control. Surrounding them on the other three walls of the control room were more screens than would be necessary for a missile launch, and each one was broken down into a grid of mini screens, every image growing tinier and tinier as the number of them increased. Janey went to zoom in with her glasses, only to discover that they’d been removed.

  ‘What’s on the screens?’ she asked.

  ‘All the athletes.’ Jack stared glumly through the glass. ‘There are millions of them. That will be a lot of money from fan sponsorships for some very nasty people.’

  So they’d worked out some of what was going on – or some of it. She wasn’t entirely sure she was right, of course, but it made a horrid sort of sense.

  ‘It’s worse than that. I reckon all those poor people will dial in to sponsor their athlete and HOST will take their money, and possibly their bank account, which is bad enough. But think about it: after that, they’ll have eyes and ears in every country in the world, attached to world-class athletes who won’t know why they’re suddenly attacking a political opponent or passing on top-secret information. It’s like a spy organisation, in a way. Talking of which…’ Janey looked inside the room and then out at the mission control area. ‘Where’s G-Ma … GM?’

  Tilly sucked in a gulp of air. ‘Okay. So! They handed her over to the British police, saying that she murdered that Trent Varley character who Jack couldn’t find, but he obviously wasn’t very dead – not when they thought he was anyway.’

  ‘He’s not dead at all,’ said Janey. ‘We saw him here. He said we only knew half the story.’

  ‘Oh! Anyway, the Big G was shouting that she’d been framed, and I think the local police were a bit scared of her so they arranged for her to be exterminated.’

  ‘Exterminated! What? They’re going to kill her?’

  With a slow, deliberate step, Jack positioned himself between them. He’d clearly been doing some deep breathing himself and was taking everything very calmly. ‘Not exterminated. Extradited.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ cried Tilly indignantly.

  ‘It isn’t. You were talking about what Daleks do when they zap people. Extradition is what the police do to make criminals face charges in the country where the crime was committed.’

  ‘Okay, Smartypants.’ Tilly wobbled her head at him, indicating that his was too big.

  Jack shrugged. ‘If I’m going to sit in the House of Lords, I might as well know about the law.’

  ‘Zooks and zounds,’ cried Stein excitedly. ‘That sounds fun!’

  Janey let her head sink into her hands. She was deeply worried about everything. It was as if the working parts of her brain were glued together in clumps. For the first time since their new adventure began, she couldn’t conjure up a way out. The room was like a hermetically sealed fish-tank, and any of her spy-buys that might help them get out had been confiscated. She guessed the others were being hamstrung, too.

  She attracted Jack’s attention and pointed to his ears. ‘Dog whistle?’

  He nodded. ‘Every time I’ve tried to make a move or even change into, you know, Jack BC.’

  ‘It works on cats too, apparently. Sooo much pain,’ said Tilly miserably. She flung a leg out towards the tempered glass and her foot merely bounced off it. ‘And it’s no good for kick-boxers.’

  ‘I, meanwhile, am useless without a laboratory. I can’t fashion a glass-cutting instrument from just one small red stone. I have only my pom juice to sustain my good spirits and my undeadness!’ Stein extracted the flagon from the leg of his pantaloons. ‘They didn’t bother taking it off me, or perhaps did not realise I had it with me. I am evidently no threat whatsoever!’ he finished with his usual chirpiness.

  ‘Have you always been this cheerful and optimistic?’ asked Janey with a grin, glad that one of them, at least, was able to maintain their cheery disposition, even with such a bleak outlook.

  ‘Indeed, no. I was lonely and quite, quite diminished,’ he said, ‘but then I made a friend, and life – or death – has looked up ever since. I have several friends now.’

  For some reason, Stein’s words cut through the room like a diamond through glass. Janey could see that Jack and Tilly were thinking the same as she was - firstly, that Stein now had three more friends, but secondly, how they’d all felt that way at some point. Life was pretty pointless without friends. With a sudden pang, Gideon Flynn floated into her mind. There was someone who might have been a friend to her, or who might have needed a friend himself.

  Now she’d never know.

  She checked the countdown clock, furious with herself for letting her mind wonder, even for a second. Every moment counted. ‘There are only six minutes to go until the Games kick off,’ she said. ‘And we’re trapped in here like hamsters. It’s infuriating.’

  Her new friends trod lit
tle repetitive paths across the floor, equally frustrated and exactly like hamsters. It was maddening to be so helpless. Surely with their combined powers, they should be able to do something

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ she cried, banging on the window. ‘Jack, you’re a god, for crying out loud, and I’m a spy, sometimes even a super-spy in certain scenarios. Tilly, you’re a cat, and a girl and a … well, magic.’

  ‘You can say “witch”,’ said Tilly nonchalantly. ‘I won’t be offended. Especially as I am one, although I’m only sort of witchy.’

  ‘Okay, well, witches are magic, and that surely counts for something. Can’t you do a spell?

  ‘I’m not supposed to in NPW – that’s Normal People World. Oh, look.’ Her silvery hair was intensifying in colour and even beginning to glow. Tilly grabbed a strand and held it before her eyes. ‘Turning blue. Oops.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Bad jujubes. Nasty baddies. End of the world, that kind of stuff.’

  ‘Just what we need.’ Why was she the only one worrying? Janey felt like shaking them all but knew it would lead to no good. ‘We must be able to do something though. A god, a spy, a witch, and an …’

  ‘Undead princely scientist,’ finished Stein, ever helpful.

  But Janey had stopped short, thinking about what she’d just said. A god, a spy, a witch. ‘Oh, my goodness! It’s an anagram,’ she whispered, ‘and an acronym.’

  ‘It’s a whoey and a whatty?’ Tilly sighed deeply and then performed a handstand against the back wall, so her hair fanned out against the floor, looking even more peculiar that usual. ‘Doesn’t anyone here speak cat?’

  ‘Not cat, but I do speak spy. Which means … puzzles.’ Janey wet the end of her finger and traced letters on the glass. ‘G for God,’ she said, writing G. ‘S for Spy. W For Witch. Those are the beginnings of an acronym – a word made up of individual letters that stand for something, like NATO.’

  Tilly gazed at the window. ‘So … GSW? It doesn’t trip of the tongue, does it?’

  ‘WGS. That’s like wags – for a dog’s tail?’ Jack beamed in delight.

  But then Janey moved it around. ‘What if S for Spy comes first, followed by W for Witch, then G for god last?’

  ‘Swrrrgg,’ tried Stein.

  ‘Close, but remember, Gideon brought this team together,’ said Janey. ‘And at the top of the list with our names on it was a word. SWAG.’

  ‘SWG. That does kind of work. But how does Stein fit in, then?’ said Jack.

  Janey turned to the younger – older – boy. ‘Stein, or rather … Petroc,’ she asked gently, ‘is there a special name that describes what you do? Not just science, but turning ordinary metal into gold and life to unusual things?’ She thought she knew it, but she wanted to hear it from him.

  Stein shifted in rather a guilty fashion. ‘I do not know if we are allowed to name it in this century, so I hesitate to say. My mother and father were chased out England for practicing such sinful potion-making. That’s why Mother asked if they still hang witches. She has always wanted to go home.’

  ‘Please, Stein. Does it start with … A?’

  They all waited, holding their breath as Stein decided to come clean.

  ‘Yes, forsooth. I am known as an Alchemist,’ he said, exaggerating the first letter.

  It was as she’d thought, but there was no time for gloating. Instead, Janey inserted the letter A into the writing on the window.

  ‘So that’s us. Spy. Witch. Alchemist. God. It all equals SWAG. I thought he’d named the project because of the stuff we were meant to steal, like booty or treasure or what a burglar takes.’

  ‘Or, you know, confidence!’ said Tilly. ‘Get your swag on.’

  Planting her feet back on the floor, she shimmied her way around the goldfish bowl, with plenty of swag.

  ‘It could have been any of those things, but it’s not. It’s us. It’s the team. Gideon’s team.’ Janey felt her eyes fill with tears, and she brushed them back, angry at herself for getting emotional. ‘And we’ve lost him. What’s the point of us, without the person who brought us together? We lost our leader.’

  ‘I don’t think we did, Blonde.’

  She was just about to ask Jack what he meant – did he mean that someone else was their leader? G-Mamma, perhaps? – when she saw that he was staring past her into the mission control room. It was filling up with people, ready for the hideous countdown and the moment when the Games would open up, along with all the secret information channels, offshore bank accounts and security networks of all the participating countries, if they only knew it. Several of the HOST ambassadors had moved indoors and were now settling down for the excitement to begin, poised in front of the monitors or the phone lines in preparation.

  But up on the balcony, high up where nobody was looking as they concentrated on the clocks, the screens, the rubies and the athlete army, two figures were fighting.

  Again.

  There was Trent Varley, squaring up to the his more slender opponent, striking out with such ferocity that there was no way he could be matched, no way his rival could even survive another attack as vicious, as potent, as deeply personal as this seemed to be …

  … especially someone like Gideon Flynn.

  He was back.

  Then two of the HOST henchmen swung around, alerted to the presence of the two brawling figures by directions in their headsets. In unison, the pair of HOST guards swept towards the balcony, one even lifting a hand to point at the sky-light above Gideon’s head … but then they simply held a quick conversation and headed out of the room together, unperturbed by the massive fist-fight going on just a couple of metres from their faces.

  It was as if they hadn’t seen them at all.

  And suddenly Janey’s brain cleared with the familiar click that told her that she’d reached some solution, the flashing light in her head that was as spot-on as any gadget that the Big G had ever managed to send in her direction.

  The letters of SWAG were still visible on the shiny surface of the glass.

  Dampening her finger again, Janey wrote out four more letters.

  HOST.

  Of course. She should have seen it earlier.

  It didn’t stand for Helping Others Save Time. It was another acronym.

  H. O. S. T.

  She wrote the names underneath in lines like the downward clues in her beloved crosswords and search-words.

  Henry. Oscar. Simone. Trent. H-O-S-T.

  They hadn’t just founded HOST – they were HOST. A team. A set of friends, perhaps, rather like SWAG.

  She stared at it, heart pounding furiously as another clue slid into her brain. It had prodded at her mind since she first saw it, because she’d learned cyphers and codes like this with G-Mamma and the other spies. How could she have missed it all this time?

  It wasn’t a phone number that she was mapping out on the window now – 0708 151 920. That was just the way she’d heard it, or maybe the way she’d deliberately been told it.

  It was another type of code, not in phone formation, but in pairs:

  O7 08 15 19 20.

  It was so obvious, now that she was looking at it in the correct way.

  H, for Henry, the eighth letter of the alphabet – or 08. O for Oscar was the fifteenth; S for Simone was letter 19 in the alphabet, and T for Trent the letter that came immediately after it, matching the number 20.

  Which just left the first pair of numbers.

  07

  It was ironic that it sounded almost like a famous spy’s number, 007, because in this instance, it wasn’t a spy code. It was an initial.

  G.

  G for … Gideon.

  Struggling to hold back her tears, Janey wrote the letter in front of the others, above the digits 07. It transformed the letters making the word HOST into something else – something incredibly and horribly appropriate.

  GHOST.

  Through the damp, scribbled letters on the window, Janey stared at t
he young man trying to avoid Trent Varley’s pounding fists. That was why he couldn’t be touched. That was how he could access the dead, the magic, the spy world of old with characters like Garbo. That was why he dressed like he did. Why he’d had to lead them to discover what had happened, because he couldn’t tackle it himself. Why Jack could always see him but was surprised they could … which must be because he’d used the Wower and … the VoxPop and … ‘Pom juice!’ whispered Janey. Why he’d appeared to die, plunging to his death, and yet Jack couldn’t find him, and why he had seen Trent before anyone else …

  She knew everything there was to know, instinctively and intuitively. He caught her eye, and she knew that he could see she’d worked it all out. Putting a hand across his heart, Gideon gazed directly at her, and in that instant she knew what a fight, what a long and thankless struggle this had been for him. The tears flowed down her cheeks as she turned to the team. His team – the team he’d assembled to put things right, if it could ever be possible.

  The team of SWAG.

  ‘So is neither of them dead, then?’ said Tilly, following the punches in mime, only ducking rather more effectively than Gideon. ‘Only I’m completely confused now. That Trent dude died. But they keep disappearing and showing up again.’

  Janey shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think either one of them is dead,’ she said quietly. ‘Because it’s both of them. They’re both dead.’

  Chapter 23 - A compound problem

  He’d tried to stop it snowballing, really he had. They were just meant to be an innocent science group, pooling resources and interests to move together towards the future. It was a fascinating time, what with men landing on the moon only a few years before, and massive, powerful computers taking up whole rooms in businesses across the country, like Henry’s father’s company. Working together in this way, they all reasoned – well, they’d just be saving time.