Truly Deadly: The Complete Series: (YA Spy Thriller Books 1-5)

by Rob Aspinall

  I guess you could call it a prayer.

  Dear Heavenly Awesomeness,

  I don’t believe in you. But if you are real, please, please punish these fuckers. See it on your big CCTV and dispatch your angel army down with thunder guns and death lasers. Okay, I don’t know what thunder guns are exactly, but the point is, just kill them all now for picking on the innocent … For being total dicks and massive mega-sinners. That’s what you specialise in, isn’t it?

  If not for me, then do it for Auntie Claire. She is … was … your biggest fan. She read all your books and knew all the words to your songs … I promise I won’t eat meat, or swear or take your name in vain again. Send help soon. Ideally in the next thirty seconds.

  Thx, Lorna.

  The two men pushed my arms up and over the hook, so that I hung by the wrists on my tiptoes. The Craftsman yanked the bale away fast from beneath my feet. I dropped. The beam creaked under my weight. The tape burned tight into my wrists, while my mouth searched out what little air there was inside the bag, the plastic hot, sweaty and sticky on my face. The Craftsman stepped back in front of me, admiring his latest masterpiece.

  “How long will this take exactly?” a bored Smugorella asked, leaning back against one of the animal pens, playing on her iPad. Another game with jaunty, digi-pop music.

  “Depends on how fast the CO2 builds up,” Nathan said, tossing his coffee cup on the floor. “How much lung capacity she’s got … How many tiny holes there are in the bag … Five, six minutes?”

  Smugorella tutted and rolled her eyes.

  “Gonna make a call,” Nathan said. “Tell the boss the good news.”

  Every second lasted a minute. I swayed gently, trying to hang on to life. Why bother? The wooden beam groaned like a sick old man as the chain twisted this way and that. All I wanted to do was wipe the snot away from my top lip. I glanced sideways across the barn. Smugorella was munching loudly on something, sticking her hand in my bag.

  Bitch be eating my M&Ms!

  The remaining guard leaned back against a wall, texting. Nathan slipped out of the barn doors, on his phone, laughing and saying Marvellous, marvellous in full-on chirpy bird mode.

  We were all passing the time.

  I looked down at my feet, hanging a hay bale short of the floor. My Midnight Black nails chipped. My tan missing a bit in between the toes. My eyes moved up to my calves, looking slender and toned. (Hey, at least that was something, right?)

  I looked back up to The Craftsman. His eyes were on the move too.

  He looked into my scar.

  He looked at Auntie Claire’s body.

  He turned and looked at the rest of Team Evil.

  He looked into my eyes.

  Back to Team Evil.

  Back to my scar.

  If I could have spoken, if I wasn’t sucking desperately on a bag while my arms pulled themselves out of their sockets, I would have told him to stop it. He was putting me off remembering the best bits of my life: The Becki kiss. My parents taking me on a picnic when I was little. Being told they’d found me a donor, for real. And … oh balls. I was slipping out of consciousness, like coming out of anaesthetic in reverse. I tried to stay with the good memories. I tried not to think of all the terrible mistakes I’d made. But the thoughts became clouds and all I could see was The Craftsman and his dancing eyes.

  Until his eyes stopped.

  He unclipped a holster around his shoulder and pulled out a gun. He pushed off the safety and turned to face the barn doors, gun held down by his side.

  The guard looked up and dropped his phone. “Oh shit,” he said, raising his weapon.

  The Craftsman raised his in return. Suddenly, the barn flashed loud and fierce with gunfire. The Craftsman beat the guard to the punch, flooring him with a bullet through the heart. Smugorella was more PA than field agent. By the time she’d dropped the iPad and fumbled a tiny silver pistol out of her bag, The Craftsman had blown a hole in the left lapel of her immaculate suit jacket, spinning her off the railing into the empty animal pen.

  Jesus Christ, this God stuff was true after all! He’d heard my dying prayers and sent an angel to possess the body of The Craftsman. It was a miracle!

  Or maybe he was a psycho-killer gone postal. Oh yeah, there was that.

  The Craftsman turned his gun on me.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  I squeezed my eyes shut.

  39

  Peaks & Troughs

  I heard a bang, a metallic snap. Felt a sudden release of pressure around my wrists. The hook and chain hit the floor a split second after me. I landed with a heavy thud on the wooden boards below, knees bent, fingertips on rough sawdust, steadying my weight.

  I wrestled with the tape around my neck and pulled it loose, ripped the bag from my face and gasped, swallowing oil tankers full of beautiful sheep-shit air. It tasted like heaven. The Craftsman waved a hand at me to stay down. He stooped on one knee and took aim at the barn doors. The remaining guard busted on through, machine gun blasting. The Craftsman returned fire. One shot to the head and the guard was recent history. I tore at the tape around my wrists with my teeth until I could slide a hand out.

  Then another.

  Free!

  The barn door creaked back and forth. I caught a glimpse of Nathan outside, gawping in, shocked out of his tiny mind. He turned and ran. I exploded off the floor into a sprint across the barn, The Craftsman letting me go. I scooped a gun mid-run from the second dead guard’s open palm.

  Outside the barn, everything was big. The hills. The sky. The fields and the trees and the sea, and the mountains hazy grey in the distance. A land built for giants.

  Nasty little Nathan was a tiny human ant in comparison, opening the door of a black SUV, one of three vehicles parked up a Frisbee throw away from the barn. I fumbled with the gun, anxious for revenge. It kicked back in my hands and I missed by a distance. Nathan retrieved an automatic rifle from the SUV. He slung it over a shoulder and let rip. A rat-a-tat of hot bullets chased me behind a rusty trough and pinged into the metal. I shot blindly back a couple of times before peeping over the top. Nathan was already moving round to the driver’s side. He let off another round as he climbed in, pinning me low behind the trough. I heard the SUV engine fire up, wheels spinning on dirt. He was away down the hill. I darted out in pursuit, blasting out the rear windscreen. But soon the SUV was gone, shrinking into the valley below.

  I clicked empty, threw the gun and screamed. A primal scream that triggered rock slides, shook birds out of trees and stopped sheep, deer and wolves in their tracks.

  I leaned back against the wooden post that supported the metal swing gate leading to the barn. I bent over double and breathed heavily, shaking the fire out of my arms, still burning after hanging from that hook.

  Further up the hill, a car door slammed shut and an engine rumbled into life. One of the vehicles parked outside the barn – an Audi four-by-four – trundled down the hill and pulled up alongside me, the driver’s window whirring down.

  “Your bag’s in the car,” said The Craftsman. “Get in.”

  “What?” I said. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “I insist,” he said, cocking his weapon in my direction.

  “Whatever,” I said, past caring.

  There was no way was I getting in that car. Not with one of them. I set off up the hill. I wanted to see Auntie Claire. Maybe she was still alive, I thought. People got shot in the head and lived all the time, didn’t they?

  The Craftsman got out of the Audi and holstered his weapon. He slapped a heavy hand on my shoulder. I tried to twist his arm at the wrist, but it was like trying to bend steel. He grabbed me by both arms and shook me like a maraca.

  “Your aunt is gone.”

  “Let me go! I’m not leaving her!”

  He dragged me down the hill as I tried to walk up it, my feet sliding backwards on the grass.

  “Let me go!” I shouted, falling over flat.

 
; Just then, a missile tore straight over our heads and lit up the barn. The boom followed a split second later, like God clapping, the ground shaking beneath my body, an orange and black fireball mushrooming into a sky raining splintered wooden boards.

  “On second thoughts,” I said, “maybe I’ll get in, after all.”

  I got to my feet and jumped into the four-by-four with The Craftsman behind the wheel. We took off down the hill, skidding sideways onto the dirt-track road. We bumped along at breakneck speed through a tight corridor of pine trees, kicking up a long snake of dusty mud. Suddenly conscious of being half naked, I covered my chest with my arms.

  The Audi rumbled over a cattle bridge and cut across a sheep field. I looked over my shoulder. A rear windscreen full of cloud.

  “There’s nothing chasing us,” I said. “Let’s catch up to Nathan. Let’s get him!”

  “No time,” The Craftsman said, craning his head to get a better view of the sky above.

  He needn’t have bothered. The drone found us, doing a fly-by overhead, before pulling a boomerang turn in the air over the smouldering remains of the barn.

  Okay, who ordered the Skybird?

  If this had been a theme-park ride, it would have had warning signs plastered all over the place.

  Classification: Aggressive Thrill Ride

  Keep hands, arms, legs and feet inside the vehicle at all times.

  Remain in an upright position until the ride comes to a stop or death occurs.

  Guests with the following conditions are advised against riding:

  Recent surgery – Heart trouble – Neck trouble

  Um, all three might be a problem. Here came the drone. It dispatched a missile our way, but The Craftsman pulled a handbrake turn, skidding a foot short of the crater it made ahead of us in the field.

  We ploughed through a prickly hedge out onto a manmade road, the drone spitting out firefly bullets after us, a couple puncturing the roof and the rear door on the driver’s side, but failing to hit anything important, i.e., me.

  Sweaty palmed, I gripped tighter on the door handle and the leather padding of the seat. As we weaved one way and another, the drone changed tack and dive-bombed us on the driver’s side. Bullets ripped through the midsection, missing the back of my seat by centimetres, but the Audi kept going and the road took us into a thick guard of evergreens where the drone couldn’t spot us so easily from overhead.

  Only trouble is, these MQ-9 Reapers (fun fact I didn’t know I even knew) were pretty nimble. It circled and dipped below the tree line, skimming the road no higher than a slam-dunk. The Craftsman made a hard right and cut into the forest. We bounced up and down in our seats, headed for the teeniest gap between two tree trunks called Smash and Crunch.

  “The object is to survive, right? Not kill ourselves,” I said, bracing every bone in my body. “Seriously! We’re not gonna fit!”

  40

  Donuts & Dust

  We just about squeezed through both trees, annihilating both wing mirrors and scraping the paint off the doors.

  “There goes the deposit,” I said. Don’t ask me why. This was an action sequence, right? That’s what people did; make smirking quips to break the tension.

  The Craftsman steered us through the forest floor, where we could travel unseen from overhead.

  But not for long.

  The whole forest exploded front and back – everything on fire. Poor, poor woodland creatures.

  “Sorry, everyone,” I couldn’t help saying.

  The Craftsman shot me a look like I was the one who was crazy. We broke out of the burning forest and stopped in a field of dry mud.

  “What the hell?” I said. “We’re sitting ducks.”

  “Hold on to something,” he said.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  He revved up the car and drifted the Audi round in a circle. Donut after donut. Mud mixed with smoke and suddenly we were cloaked in a thick, dusty cloud. I’d have appreciated the move more if everything wasn’t so nauseatingly spinny.

  Eventually, we slid violently to a stop. I hit the side of my head on the window.

  “Ow, careful!” I said.

  The Craftsman ignored me and wound down his window, poking his head out into the murk. Smoke poured into the cabin, stinging my eyes, while jet engines roared and trailed off into the distance. The drone would be back.

  JPAC always came back.

  The Craftsman stomped hard on the accelerator and raced through the gears. We punched a hole out of the cloud and made a dash onto a main road that curved up around a bend and into a tunnel drilled into a mountainside. The drone was back on us in a heartbeat, but the cloud cover had bought us enough of a jump to make a race of it.

  “Faster, faster, faster!” I said, the worst passenger in the world.

  “This is all it’s got,” The Craftsman replied, so calm he could have been on a beach, sipping sangria.

  The drone unleashed another missile. I saw it coming through the rear windscreen.

  This was going to be cloooooose.

  At the very last nanosecond, we made it into the mountainside, the missile blasting chunks out of the tunnel mouth. We came to a screeching halt halfway down the tunnel. We climbed out and listened for the MQ-9. The Craftsman opened the boot of the Audi. Inside, there was a black, heavy-duty case and tools for changing a tyre. He hauled out the black case and laid it flat on the road. He then clicked the top open to reveal a weapon divided into four sleek black parts on one side and two small yellow rocket grenades on the other. I watched him snap a couple of parts together: the barrel and the handle with the trigger. He attached a telescopic sight onto the top of the barrel.

  “Hey, I’ve got a better idea,” I said.

  “What, other than not dying?” he asked, carefully prising one of the rockets out of its mould.

  Fine. I’d just have to it myself then. I reached inside the boot of the Audi and grabbed a tyre iron. I walked round to the front of the four-by-four and pulled the driver’s seat forward. I wound the seatbelt around the wheel so it held firm. Then I wedged the tyre iron between the accelerator and the driver’s seat so it was fixed stiff, pushing the accelerator pedal all the way to the floor, revving the engine loud.

  I saw The Craftsman out of the back window, sliding a rocket into the barrel. The four-by-four was an auto. I put it in drive and grabbed my bag from the passenger footwell. On my way out, I released the handbrake.

  The Audi set off, just as The Craftsman was making his way to the tunnel entrance, the RPG on his shoulder, ready to rock. I kicked the driver’s door shut as it went. The Audi overtook The Craftsman. He stopped. And we watched it emerge into the light. There was a rumble in the walls of the tunnel. Then an almighty swoosh.

  BOOM!

  The Craftsman spun and kneeled, his back to the explosion. I was rocked a few steps by the force of the blast, hot air rushing down the tunnel. When the fire and smoke cleared, there was a small crater where the Audi used to be, tiny bits of asphalt raining back down to Earth, the vehicle fused with the road. The sound of the drone faded until all I could hear was the distant baaing of sheep.

  “There,” I said, hands on hips, “now they think we’re dead.”

  The Craftsman stood up, rocket launcher still over one shoulder, aimed at me. For a second or two, I thought he was going to blast me into the tunnel wall. Loose ends and all that.

  “Okay, that was a better idea,” he said, lowering the weapon.

  With the rocket launcher packed up, we made our way out of the tunnel. The missile that missed had blown out some of the mountain wall over the road, but with a little weaving around rocks and craters, the tunnel was still accessible at both ends.

  We stepped around the debris and out into the light. We waited by the side of the road where we’d entered, the smell of pine bonfires wafting over from the blazing, crackling forest. So potent you could taste the ash.

  I pulled my dress from my bag, thinking how much
Auntie Claire would have disapproved of it. I swallowed down the grim reminder of her death, just like swallowing down sick. I slipped into the dress and sorted out my post-mock suicide hair the best I could without a brush and a mirror.

  Heavy anvil clouds gathered overhead, low enough to poke. They spat for rain, threatening to burst, as if they’d come to put out the forest fire.

  “Don’t you think you should take the ski mask off?” I asked The Craftsman. “Doesn’t exactly scream slow down and help.”

  He put down the case and grunted what sounded like an okay. He peeled off his murdering gloves first, tossing them by the side of the road; then he put a hand to the top of his ski mask and pulled it off his head, revealing his face for the first time.

  I stared at him in shock. I couldn’t believe it. What the fuck?

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Yeah, that’s because I had.

  41

  Hey, I'm Dead! What Next?

  Impossibly, it was him. The square jaw. The deep brown eyes. The flattish nose. And come to think of it, the unplaceable European accent too.

  “What is it?” he asked, tiring of me gawping at him.

  “Um, hello?” I said. “You’re dead. You died. You can’t be—”

  “Well, I am,” Philippe said, lifting the bottom of his plain black tee to dab the sweat from his face.

  The guy was ripped. Even his abs had abs. A still-healing bullet-wound scar to the left of his gut kind of ruined the aesthetic. He pulled his T-shirt up further to wipe his forehead. He had a post-op scar just like mine. He dropped the T-shirt.

  “Looks like we have something in common,” he said, tapping his sternum. “Small world.”

  I stepped forward and slapped him hard across the face.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  “For making me kiss my best friend, you big perv.”