The Fail Safe

by Jack Heath

  When Fero arrived, the store looked the same as when he last saw it – the same cracked brickwork and graffiti-covered park bench – but he felt as though he was seeing it through different eyes. Now he could remember shopping there with his father and his sister, before they moved to the other side of Tus. Before they . . .

  He shut his eyes. Seeing his mother had worsened his identity mash-up. He had even more of Troy Maschenov’s memories mixed in with his own.

  His own? Fero Dremovich wasn’t a real person.

  The doors slid open, jingling an old-fashioned bell. Fero was relieved to see Hulow standing behind the counter. He must get sore standing there all day. Fero could walk or run huge distances, but if he stood still for too long his calves ached.

  ‘Hi, Hulow,’ he said.

  The old man turned a slightly filmy eye on him. His face broke into a grin. ‘Miss Yordic’s nephew,’ he said. ‘How nice to see you!’

  ‘You have an amazing memory,’ Fero said. He had only come in once, briefly, almost a month ago.

  Hulow tapped his wrinkled forehead. ‘My memory is terrible – but your aunt called me. She asked me to let you into her post office box.’

  Fero looked around at the grocery store. ‘This is a post office?’

  ‘It used to be. Only the boxes are left. Come.’ Hulow opened a narrow door and hustled Fero into a small storeroom. The shelves on one side were piled high with canned food and stationery supplies. The opposite wall was lined with locked metal boxes.

  Hulow unlocked one of the boxes with a brass key. ‘I don’t recall any mail coming in for Miss Yordic lately,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I may have forgotten. Let me know when you are finished.’ He shuffled out and closed the door.

  Fero opened the box. The padded package inside was covered with dust. It was addressed simply to the PO box number. No name, no return address.

  He tore open the package. Inside was a wad of cash, a mobile phone, a pair of scissors and some hair dye. There was also a small signal jammer. Fero recalled from Vartaniev’s training that a device like this would interfere with radios, mobile phones and GPS devices within a range of twenty metres.

  There were two more items in the package. One was a pair of spectacles – the lenses were plain glass, no prescription.

  The other was a loaded handgun.

  The mobile phone was the kind with very few features but excellent battery life. Fero switched it on and called the number Cormanenko had given him back in Kamau.

  She picked up on the first ring. ‘Choose your words carefully,’ she said. There was nothing reassuring about her tone, but Fero was relieved to hear her voice.

  ‘Is someone listening?’ he asked.

  ‘Just computers – unless we use the wrong keyword, or we talk for more than two minutes. Then a person will patch in.’

  ‘Your friend didn’t make it.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Cormanenko asked. ‘No names.’

  ‘He was near the wall when something came over.’

  A pause.

  ‘You’ll have to cancel the metal delivery,’ Fero said. ‘The copies.’ He hoped she understood. If Xin swapped out the plutonium cores of Kamau’s nuclear missiles for depleted uranium duplicates, Kamau would be defenceless.

  ‘No,’ Cormanenko said.

  Fero wondered how he could explain himself without using the words nuclear annihilation. They only had thirty seconds before someone would be listening.

  ‘There’s another way,’ Cormanenko said. ‘You could collect something from the man.’

  The storeroom disappeared. Fero’s world shrank down to just himself and the hissing of the phone. Unless he had misunderstood, she was asking him to steal the launch codes from the Besmari prime minister.

  He had expected her to thank him for the intel and explain a fast, easy way out of Besmar. He had even dared to hope that she would offer a safe-house and another false identity in Russia or Belarus, where he could live in comfort for as long as he chose.

  Instead she was giving him marching orders, a disguise, and a gun.

  ‘It will be in a briefcase,’ Cormanenko continued. ‘Black, with a brown handle and silver trim. Thirty-five by twenty-five by fifteen centimetres. It will be within ten metres of the man at all times – except when he’s at his office.’

  ‘I can’t do this,’ Fero said. ‘Call off the metal delivery.’ He figured they had about ten seconds left.

  ‘It’s too late,’ Cormanenko said. ‘The metal is in transit as we speak. Time to decide.’

  Fero squeezed his eyes shut. He had no backup, no plan, no invisibility device. He didn’t even have his spring-heeled shoes. If he agreed to help Cormanenko, he would probably die. If he didn’t, Kamau would be blasted out of existence.

  Troy Maschenov had been willing to kill for his country. Was he now willing to die for someone else’s? Would that make up for the things he had done?

  Static hissed quietly on the line.

  ‘I’m in,’ Fero said, and hung up.

  COVERT OPERATIVE

  Fero put the scissors, the hair dye, the glasses and the signal jammer back into the package. He no longer had the suitcase – he’d left it behind a dumpster near the hotel – so he folded the package and stuffed it into his pocket, along with the phone and the wad of cash.

  The gun he put back in the PO box, which he locked. Vartaniev had told him it was acceptable to kill some in order to save others – and he had believed it. Now he didn’t trust himself to take the gun with him. He didn’t even want to look at it.

  Fero spent some of the cash in Hulow’s store. He bought fruit, mixed nuts, water, bandages and a small tube of disinfectant, just in case. He also purchased a packaged set of pyjamas that included a long-sleeved shirt made of dark grey cotton.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ he said to Hulow. ‘I see why my aunt always says such nice things about you.’

  Hulow chuckled again, his hands on his belly like Santa.

  Outside the shop, Fero crouched behind the skip bins, changed into his new shirt and put his coat on over the top; then he jogged to the South Tus train station. Prime Minister Dosslov would probably be in Premiovaya, near Parliament, but Fero wasn’t ready to go straight there. He needed more supplies. He needed a plan. So instead he caught the train to the centre of Tus, keeping his head down to avoid the cameras.

  He emerged from the station into a large shopping centre. It was so similar to the megamall in Stolkalny that it was a shock every time he heard someone speaking in Besmari. Our two countries are so similar, he thought. And yet these shoppers would instantly turn on one another – or flee in terror – if they thought a Kamauan was among them.

  He locked himself in a disabled toilet and cut his hair. Dark brown locks tumbled into the sink. Snip by snip, Troy Maschenov and Fero Dremovich both disappeared. He wet his remaining hair, smeared dye all over it and watched a stranger emerge in the mirror.

  The boy who walked out of the bathroom looked nothing like the boy who had gone in. He had short blond hair and glasses. He moved differently too, with a bored swagger, an incurious expression on his face.

  This boy walked into a menswear shop and bought a briefcase. He was very specific about the colour and dimensions. It was his father’s fortieth birthday, he explained, and his father was very picky. While he was there the boy also bought new trousers and a jacket, both in dark colours. Warm but lightweight and easy to move in. He put them on in a changing room and paid in cash.

  His next stop was a shoe store. ‘I need some new running shoes,’ he told the shop assistant.

  The assistant smiled. ‘Certainly. What sort of running do you do? Sprinting or cross country?’

  ‘Both,’ the boy said. ‘Sometimes hurdling, too. I need something which is good for speed – really good for speed – but can handle rough terrain as well.’

  ‘I have just the thing.’ The assistant led him over to a display cabinet and took out the most expensive running sho
es in the store. It was a classic sales strategy. When the customer couldn’t afford these shoes and asked to see the others, the rest of the range would seem inexpensive. But the boy surprised him.

  ‘Can I try them on?’ he asked.

  ‘These are high-top racing flats.’ The assistant removed the shoes from the cabinet. ‘Mesh uppers so they don’t get too hot or moist, and plenty of impact diffusion around the toe and heel. Three out of the top five cross-country racers on the Besmari Olympic team wear these.’

  The boy slipped into them and hopped up and down. The assistant knew from experience that these shoes felt amazing. He hoped the cheaper brands wouldn’t seem too shoddy in comparison.

  ‘I’ve had better,’ the boy said finally. ‘Do you have any with springs in the heels?’

  The shop assistant frowned. ‘Do you mean wheels?’

  ‘No, I . . .’ The boy hesitated. ‘Actually, yes. Can I try those on?’

  Fero caught a train to Premiovaya. Again, it was a risk – there were cameras in the carriages, and passengers who may have seen his picture. But Cormanenko’s mission was time critical. He just had to hope the glasses would fool the facial recognition algorithms, and the haircut would fool the human beings.

  The new shoes were uncomfortable at first. He’d had to change his walking style, putting more weight on the balls of his feet to avoid sliding on the wheels hidden beneath his heels. But Premiovaya was a city rippled with slopes. If someone chased him downhill, he could lean back on his heels and roll, using gravity to achieve speeds his pursuers couldn’t.

  He sat with the briefcase on his lap, checking the reflection of other commuters in the window. It was rush hour. Everyone looked tired after a long day of work. No one seemed to be watching him. But spies were good at pretending not to watch. Fero told himself that a Teller wouldn’t follow him, they’d just shoot him on the spot. This thought wasn’t especially reassuring.

  He got off the train with a crowd of other commuters and took the steps up to the street. When he emerged, he found himself looking at Parliament House. The bulletproof glass shone in the light from the setting sun, and the Besmari flag billowed high above the building. A row of armed guards stood in front of the fence, as evenly spaced as traffic bollards.

  Fero turned around slowly, assessing the landscape. Parliament House was at the end of Memorial Avenue, a straight, wide road that led downhill to the main part of the city, about three kilometres away. The road was lined with trees – too thin and leafless to provide any cover – and park benches, currently empty, because it was a cold winter evening.

  Fero remembered from his work as a Teller that the nuclear launch codes were protected by several layers of security. First, very few people knew where they were, although the Library’s spies had figured it out, which was probably how Cormanenko knew. Second, there were two sets of codes – one kept at Parliament House, the other kept within ten metres of the prime minister at all times. If Parliament House were destroyed, the prime minister could use his set of codes to launch the missiles. Or if the prime minister were killed, the deputy prime minister or the defence minister could use the codes at Parliament House to trigger a nuclear attack.

  The prime minister himself was impossible to get to. In addition to a bulletproof limousine and a group of highly trained bodyguards, he had a pocket emergency siren that was loud enough to disturb the fluid in the ear, causing any attackers to lose their balance. But whenever the prime minister was at Parliament House, the Teller with the codes waited at an underground security bunker further along Memorial Avenue. If Parliament House were blown up with the prime minister inside, there would still be a set of intact codes which a surviving member of Parliament could use to launch the nukes.

  Fero walked down the road until he found the bunker, about two kilometres from Parliament. It didn’t look like much – just a concrete slab behind the trees with a thick iron door set into it. A sign read simply: KEEP OUT. Behind that door would be a staircase, leading down and down and down so far that no explosion on the surface could touch it.

  Cormanenko’s other agent had already swapped the codes at Parliament House for useless fakes. But it wouldn’t be easy for Fero to steal the other set from the prime minister’s bodyguards. The briefcase would be attached to someone’s wrist by a security cable, and that someone would be surrounded by armed Tellers. None of them would have a key to the security cable or to the briefcase itself.

  Fero pictured the prime minister’s limousine cruising from the city onto Memorial Avenue. It would stop here. The Teller with the briefcase would get out. He would walk ten steps from the road to the entrance to the bunker, flanked by two other Tellers. Then he would go inside and lock the big iron door behind him while the limousine rolled the rest of the way up the road and disappeared into the car park beneath Parliament.

  Those ten steps were as exposed as the briefcase would ever get. How could Fero possibly take advantage of such a narrow window? He had no way of cutting the security cable. Even if he did, the Tellers would see him coming and shoot him.

  Millions of people were depending on him – but Cormanenko had given him an impossible assignment.

  Suddenly he became aware that someone was watching him. He couldn’t tell exactly what tipped him off – it was like a dead spot in the air somewhere behind him. Someone standing still, saying nothing but changing the flow of pedestrian traffic with their presence. Leaving a gap in the hubbub of conversation that Fero somehow sensed.

  He turned around. There was nobody there – or no one suspicious, at least. The Parliament guards were too far away to see him. The commuters were ignoring him, heading for parked cars and chained-up bicycles with their collars turned up against the cold.

  Fero jumped sideways just in time. The knife flashed out of the darkness, slicing through his new jacket. He spun to face his assailant, who had deftly slipped behind him when he was looking for her a second ago. There she was, so close he could see her pupils, giant in the dark.

  It was Wolf.

  She swung the knife again. It was a short blade, but wickedly sharp, with a hook on the end. It might not kill him on the way in, but it would on the way out.

  Fero blocked the thrust with his new briefcase. The knife punched through the leather and got stuck. He grabbed her wrist and stepped towards her so she couldn’t pull out the knife. To passers-by, it would look like they were hugging, or dancing.

  ‘How did you find me?’ he demanded.

  It was a poorly chosen question, and Wolf ignored it. She dropped the skewered briefcase and reached for another weapon in her pocket. She was strong, and fast. Fero couldn’t overpower her. Maybe he could convince her they were on the same side – but what would someone like Wolf want to hear?

  ‘I can help you kill everyone in Besmar,’ he hissed.

  Wolf faltered. Fero let go of her wrist and jumped out of reach before she could try to stab him again.

  She didn’t need to. She pulled a handgun just far enough out of her pocket for Fero to see. Then she slipped it back in and pointed it at him through the fabric of her coat. ‘People think they’re safe in crowds,’ she said. ‘They’re not. I could kill you now and walk away. There are so many people here that I’d be long gone before anyone worked out where the shot came from.’

  ‘Not if I grabbed you and shouted “Kamauan spy”,’ Fero said, trying to buy some time to come up with a plan. ‘Then they’d notice you pretty quick.’

  Wolf didn’t sound worried. ‘My threat was better. You have five seconds to explain yourself.’

  Fero talked quickly and quietly. ‘Someone working for Dessa Cormanenko stole the nuclear launch codes from Parliament House. But the Bank doesn’t know.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, if we can get to the other set of codes, this country will be defenceless. The Library can attack without fear of retaliation.’

  Wolf looked bedraggled, hollow-eyed. Under her coat she wore the same clothes as before.
He wondered if her last two days had been as tough as his.

  ‘This is a trick,’ she said.

  Fero gestured at Parliament House. ‘Why else would I be here? With every Teller in Besmar looking for me?’

  ‘You would never willingly help us use nuclear weapons against your country.’

  If she realised that Cormanenko had disarmed Kamau as well, she would warn Noelein. ‘I gave up my childhood for Besmar,’ Fero said. ‘I risked my life for her. I was ready to kill for her. I served her loyally for years. And then, yesterday, my commanding officer pointed a gun at my head. My former colleagues chased me across the country. My own mother drugged me and tried to turn me in.’

  Wolf stared at him, as sympathetic as a glacier.

  ‘I want to turn this whole place to ash,’ he said. ‘But I need your help.’

  Wolf searched his eyes for deception. Fero could practically hear her thoughts: If it’s true, I could win this war today. If it’s not true, I can always kill him later.

  She let go of the gun in her pocket and put the knife away. ‘You have a plan?’

  Fero nodded. ‘Do you still have that sniper rifle?’

  The plutonium cores didn’t look dangerous. They were just silver-grey rings about ten centimetres across. They didn’t glow green. They didn’t make an audible crackling or humming. But Xin knew they were currently emitting lethal levels of gamma radiation. Without the lead-lined hazmat suit, touching them would certainly kill her.

  This might be the last time Xin was alone with the warheads. Tomorrow, or possibly even today, Noelein would check if she had implemented the new three-person security protocol. If she hadn’t, and Noelein guessed that Xin had betrayed her, that would mean certain death.

  The other technician would be back from the bathroom any second now, and it wouldn’t be long before the silo’s security team noticed that the camera feeds in this room had frozen. Xin needed to hurry.

  Very, very carefully, she put her hand through the open panel on the side of the warhead. She reached into the circle of explosives and picked up the last plutonium ring. It was heavy – five kilograms – but she managed to lift it out without bumping anything fragile. The Geiger counter on her belt went wild, creaking like the rusty hinges of a heavy door.