The Fail Safe

by Jack Heath

  Wilt’s phone rang. He answered it immediately. ‘Yes?’

  There was a long pause as he listened. His expression was unreadable. Zuri had shared a bed with this man for a year and she still felt like she didn’t know him at all. Pretending to love Maschenov was easier than pretending to love Wilt.

  ‘Understood,’ Wilt said. He ended the call. ‘I’ve been reassigned.’

  Zuri frowned. ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning our mission is over. I’ve been summoned to the Library. You’re supposed to stay here and scrub the apartment. No prints, hair fibres or saliva traces left behind. Collect all the bugs, too. Someone will be here later to dispose of the clothes and computers. If Maschenov shows up, capture and secure him for transport.’

  Zuri tried to imagine subduing Maschenov. If he knew who he was, it would be hard. If he didn’t – if he still thought she was his mother – it would be even harder. She told herself that she could do it. Orders were orders.

  ‘Is our cover blown?’ she asked.

  ‘Just get it done, agent.’

  Wilt left the room. Seconds later, Zuri heard the front door close.

  With a sinking feeling, she descended the stairs and turned on the TV. She flicked through a few channels before she found a news bulletin.

  ‘. . . citizens not to approach the suspect,’ the newsreader was saying. ‘Maschenov is considered highly dangerous. Anyone who sees him should keep their distance and call the following number.’

  A montage of photos flashed up on the screen. Some of them Zuri had taken herself at family barbecues and school fundraising events. All the faces were blurred out except for Maschenov’s. A hotline appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  Zuri turned off the TV and looked around at the home she had shared for a year. After today she would never return here. This apartment only existed to fool Maschenov, and within hours he would be dead. Maybe he already was.

  Don’t think about it, Zuri told herself. Focus on the mission.

  Still, she had to stifle a sense of loss as she soaked a sponge in hot water and detergent. Maschenov was unlikely to get away, with his face all over the news and the Library on his trail. Although it felt like treason even to think it, part of her wished him luck.

  She took the sponge to the window overlooking the Chernov River – she had seen Maschenov touch the glass yesterday – and started to wipe it. Orders were orders.

  SUGGESTED MEMORIES

  By the time Sergeant Hilliev found Fero’s phone, Fero himself was halfway to the Ukrainian border. The wind had carried the smoke southwest, so he had run that way as it dissipated, surrounded by a panicked crowd. After a few blocks he had ducked into another underground train station. He didn’t board the waiting train; the cap and sunglasses would look suspect inside the carriage. Instead he slipped into a shadowy corner of the platform until it trundled away. Then he jumped down onto the tracks and ran after it.

  It was freezing down here. Partway up the tunnel Fero stopped to pull his black pants on over the top of his green ones. He would need warmer clothes soon, but this would get him to the border.

  He knew the subway well, and not just from his escapades a month ago. When he was twelve, Troy Maschenov had sneaked across the border into Kamau and used these tunnels to get to Stolkalny. According to Noelein, he had then broken into her house, concealed himself in her ceiling and prepared to poison her with a sodium cyanide drip. But the house had been fitted with a defence system. Toxic gas was pumped into the ceiling. Troy was knocked out and captured.

  This sounded like another one of Noelein’s lies. She could have made up this story to turn herself into the victim and him into the villain. But he definitely remembered these tunnels. Even in pitch blackness he had a sense of how far he had travelled, what the next station was, and how to avoid the deadly drainage holes between the tracks.

  The dim rumble of a distant train echoed through the subway. Just in time, Fero squeezed himself between a ladder and the wall. Seven carriages swept past, lights flickering behind scratched glass, wheels throwing sparks at Fero’s legs. Soon the train disappeared into the darkness and the roar died away. Fero emerged and kept running.

  When he reached the next station he clambered up onto the platform. No passengers were around, but cameras were everywhere. He could only hope that no one was looking for him this far from the chaos in Coralsk. Anybody hunting him would be searching up north, in the direction his phone had been heading, and towards the Besmari border. By the time someone thought to check subway platforms in this direction, he planned to be over the border in Ukraine. He munched on an apple while he waited for the next train.

  When it arrived, he boarded an empty carriage and rode all the way to Opinensk, the second last stop on the line. He vaulted over the turnstile without paying – the Library would have set up an alert on his rail pass – and then walked to Bvodervos. He would have liked to ride the train the whole way, but Bvodervos was the southernmost town in Kamau. The Library might be monitoring the station.

  Out on the street, cars trundled past Fero, bored civilian drivers taking no notice of him. He was so close. He felt like a Siberian tiger who had escaped from the zoo and was standing at the edge of a deep, dark forest.

  The hard part would be getting through the checkpoint into Ukraine. The Kamauan border guards would be on the lookout for him. But if he made it past them he could bluff, hitchhike, steal and bribe his way across Ukraine towards Besmar. Once he crossed that border he would be safe. He just hoped that his mother and sister hadn’t been hurt in the Premiovaya explosion.

  Fero broke into a jog. Just the thought of seeing his real family gave him an extra burst of energy.

  It was getting dark. He didn’t know this part of Kamau well, but the border couldn’t be much further. His plan was to find somewhere to watch all the people headed to the checkpoint. As soon as he saw someone who looked enough like him – and there were plenty of black-haired, brown-eyed teenage boys in Kamau – he would pick their pocket and cross the border using their passport and visa. He hoped to be out of reach by the time they realised they had been robbed.

  A man sat cross-legged on a bench at a bus stop, scrolling through a news site on his tablet. Fero glanced at the screen as he ran past – and saw himself. He stopped.

  There were two pictures. One was a CCTV freeze frame of him on the train carriage last month. He was defusing one of the three bombs – but it looked like he was setting it up. A photo like that would grab the attention of the whole country and focus their rage on him. The other picture was the mug shot from when he and Irla had been arrested after the demonstration. The headline read: Gardens Bomber Identified as Besmari National.

  By the time the man with the tablet looked up, Fero had moved on.

  This development was both good and bad. Bad, because anyone who saw him might recognise him and alert the authorities. Good, because the Library wouldn’t be distributing his picture to the press if they thought they could find him on their own. They must be worried.

  Fero rearranged his face into a slight scowl – down-turned mouth, protruding lower jaw, wrinkled nose. It was uncomfortable, but as long as he kept it up, people were less likely to connect him to the mug shot.

  Soon he reached the Anti-Terrorist Protection Rampart. Kamau bordered on Ukraine to both the south and to the west. Here on the southern border, the wall wasn’t concrete – it was just two chain-link fences, one behind the other. Laser tripwires latticed the barren ground between them. Fero couldn’t climb over the fences because of the razor wire, and he couldn’t cut through or tunnel under because of the cameras mounted every few metres. He turned left and started walking east, looking for the checkpoint.

  The streets were nearly deserted now. The sun was setting behind him. Fero wasn’t sure what the curfew rules were in Bvodervos, and his jumper didn’t offer much protection against the cold. If he didn’t find a checkpoint soon he would have to shelter somewhere until sun
rise. That would give the Library an extra thirteen hours to find him.

  A forty-something woman in business trousers walked past Fero. Like him, she wore a hat and sunglasses, despite the time of day. Her leather handbag had a glove stuffed into the side pocket – Fero could see the mustard-yellow fingertips poking out.

  She avoided his gaze, and he avoided hers. By the time he realised what he had seen, she was gone.

  The factory floor stretched out below Troy Maschenov like a miniature city. Trolleys loaded with boxes rolled back and forth. Giant metal rectangles ascended and slammed down over and over again. Conveyor belts carried trays of what looked like lipstick tubes from one machine to the next.

  At nine years old, Troy wasn’t even the youngest worker in the factory. The work was straightforward, and to someone who had never before held a real job, the wages seemed like a fortune. Lots of kids had signed up to spend their summer holidays here.

  Troy told himself he was here for the money. His mother didn’t go to work anymore. His father’s life insurance would only get them so far. He wouldn’t admit that he was desperate to get out of the house. He didn’t know it yet, but this was to be his last summer before he joined the army.

  The woman in charge was shouting to be heard over the clangs and gasps of the machinery. Troy guessed she was explaining the safety procedures, but he wasn’t really paying attention. Something something hard hat something at all times. Something emergency stop button something something fire exit. He stared at the pistons and swivelling robot arms below. The woman handed out safety goggles, earplugs, masks, and thick khaki-coloured dishwashing gloves made of something heavy and smooth. Troy put them on, already getting sweaty, and followed the other kids down the rusty stairs to the factory floor.

  His station was between two deafening machines. To his right was an enormous steel box called a ‘stamper’, which dropped cylinders of metal marked D-38 onto a tray. To his left was a lathe, which sharpened the cylinders to a point. Troy’s job was to take the cylinders from the tray – they were surprisingly heavy – and fit them into slots in the lathe. Once the carving was done, a boy named Kelich would take out the pointed cylinders and put them into little plastic tubes.

  Troy got bored quickly. It was too loud to talk. The gloves went all the way up to his elbows and they were too big, so he kept dropping the cylinders. His arms and hands felt hot and itchy.

  When he glanced over, he saw that Kelich had already taken his gloves off. Troy had assumed the metal cylinders were hot, but Kelich didn’t handle them as though they were. Without the gloves he was able to work much more quickly. Soon he was doing his job with one hand while the other played with his phone. Troy looked around. No one else had taken off their gloves. And his station was visible from the manager’s office. He sighed and left his gloves on.

  When the whistle blew and everyone started shuffling out of the factory – making way for all the workers on the night shift – Troy’s back hurt. His wrists ached and he could barely close his fists. Who would have thought that lifting little bits of metal would be so hard?

  He wasn’t sure he could handle three more weeks of this, but he turned up the next day anyway. Kelich was very pale. He kept swaying sideways as though he couldn’t balance on his feet.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Troy asked.

  Kelich nodded but said nothing.

  When the woman in charge was about to send them to the factory floor, she grabbed Kelich’s wrist. Troy saw that his right hand, the one that had been picking up the cylinders, was blistered all over. It looked like he had put his palm down on a sizzling stove. Troy stared. Had the metal been hot after all?

  ‘Go home,’ the woman told Kelich. ‘Don’t come back.’

  Kelich opened his mouth to object, and vomited all over her boots.

  That was the only time Troy saw radiation sickness up close. It frightened him, and he quit the job. He found out later that the factory had been making bullets out of depleted uranium – spent nuclear fuel. Useful for piercing armour, and very toxic.

  Many Besmari children had died in factories like this one. But more would die if Kamau won the war.

  Fero turned around, but the woman had disappeared. He was sure of what he had seen. The glove was thick, seamless and – judging by the way she carried the handbag – heavy. Why was she walking around Bvodervos with radiation attenuation gloves in her bag?

  A few possibilities. She could work in the radiology department of a hospital, or a dental surgery. She might be employed by a munitions factory, as he had been. But her manner was secretive. This was too late to be leaving a standard job. And then there were the sunglasses.

  Somewhere under Kamau was a silo containing six thermonuclear warheads, ready to annihilate Besmar and probably a chunk of Belarus or Russia, depending on which way the wind carried the radioactive debris. The Bank had several spies undercover in Kamau, accumulating ‘interest’ – the Besmari code word for intelligence. None of them had ever figured out where the silo was. Now a careless engineer might have led Fero right to it.

  It would be night soon. He was running out of time to get to the checkpoint. But what was the point of getting back to Besmar if Kamau was about to attack it with nuclear weapons? His mother, his sister and everyone else over the border were in danger.

  If he followed this woman to the silo, he could tell Vartaniev where it was. Vartaniev could send his undercover operatives to break in and disable the weapons. It was his duty.

  Fero turned around and followed the woman with the gloves.

  When he rounded the corner she was halfway up a nearby alley, head down, shoulders hunched. She seemed to be trying to avoid the cameras. The silo was top secret – even the Cataloguers weren’t supposed to know where it was – but that didn’t explain her behaviour. People who worked at classified locations had triceps implants that broadcast do not track instructions to the cameras. Cataloguers would find the footage missing, or certain faces would be blurred.

  He followed the woman to a warehouse. It had no front-facing windows, just a grubby brick facade, some rusted ventilation grids and a high gabled roof. She unlocked the front door, slipped through and pulled it closed behind her.

  Fero ran up and pressed his ear against the wood. He could hear her footsteps getting fainter and fainter. No voices. There was a distant thud as another door closed somewhere inside the warehouse. After that, silence.

  He tried the handle. Locked. He could pick it, but it would be noisy.

  Vartaniev’s voice echoed in his head. Don’t think, Maschenov. Thinking gets you killed. Just act.

  Fero took the filed-down key from his shoe and slid it almost all the way into the lock. When he felt the tip touch the last pin, he gave the key a thump. The driver pins bounced up against their springs and Fero twisted the key at just the right moment. The lock clicked open.

  Fero turned the handle and scrambled inside. It took him two seconds to confirm that there was no one nearby and to locate some cover – a stack of pallets in a shadowed corner. He pulled the door shut behind him, sprinted over to the pallets and ducked behind them. Then he waited to see if anyone had heard him enter.

  The warehouse was bigger than it had looked from outside, with dirty iron pillars spaced five or six metres apart. The only light came from semi-transparent plastic panels set in the distant corrugated roof. The floor was unsealed concrete.

  He waited a full minute. Long enough for a group of people to hear something and send someone to investigate.

  No one came.

  Fero slipped out of his hiding place. The woman’s footprints were visible in the dust. He followed them.

  Could this really be part of the Kamauan nuclear program? Other than the gloves, the woman had worn no protective gear. The lock he’d picked had been primitive. And the warehouse looked abandoned. Broken glass littered the corners. Under the thick coat of dust was a smell of mould and pee.

  The footprints ended at another wooden door,
its paint peeling. There was no keyhole this time, just a handle. Fero listened. He could hear the woman moving, and something that sounded like a fan.

  Very, very slowly, he turned the handle and pushed the door open. The hinges didn’t squeak. Through the gap he could see a room which had probably once been an office. The woman was sitting in a camping chair facing away from Fero, fiddling with something on a rotting desk.

  Fero slipped through the doorway.

  Someone grabbed him from behind.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ a male voice hissed in his ear.

  The woman with the gloves whirled around. ‘See? I told you he was following me.’

  ‘Search him,’ a third voice, female, commanded.

  The forearm across Fero’s throat felt like an iron bar. He kicked back at his captor’s knees, but missed.

  ‘Get his legs!’ the man shouted.

  If they are numerous, turn them on each other, Vartaniev instructed. If they are heavy, make them fall.

  The woman with the gloves ran over. Before she could get a grip on his ankles, Fero grabbed the arm around his neck and stepped backwards into a crouch, using his captor’s weight against him. The man flipped over Fero’s shoulder and crashed into the woman with the gloves. They both went down in a heap. Fero whirled around to deal with his third assailant—

  And found two guns pointed at his head.

  ‘Maschenov?’ a voice said.

  For the first time, Fero looked at the face behind the two guns. His eyes widened. ‘Cormanenko?’

  MUTUALLY ASSURED

  Fero had an unusual history with Cormanenko. She had shot him in the chest, but she had also saved his life. She had lied to him, but she had also been the only person to tell him the truth about who he was. She was twenty-five but looked older, with a slight bend in her broad nose and dark eyes that had seen too much.

  Nine years ago, Cormanenko’s brother had been one of hundreds murdered by the Kamauan government to halt the outbreak of a deadly virus. After he died in her arms, Cormanenko had volunteered to join the Library. It was the only way to escape from Kamau.