by Rob Aspinall
As if to confirm it, the voice of a Taiwanese soldier echoed through a loudhailer.
“They want us out,” Su said, flipping the door latch.
“Stop! Don’t go out there,” Philippe said.
“This is my country. My troops. I go.”
The minister was out before I could stop him. He walked into the bright white light of the cross beam and was approached by a grey-haired man in high-ranking uniform, flanked by a couple of soldiers.
Philippe put the Mazda in reverse gear and waited. I pulled a seatbelt over my left shoulder and clicked.
Su shook hands with General Yu and spoke for a second or two. General Yu nodded to one of the soldiers. The soldier raised the butt of his rifle and dug it hard in the base of Su’s neck.
He collapsed to the tarmac instantly. The two soldiers dragged Su’s limp body off by the armpits, his feet trailing loose across the ground.
“Hold on to something,” said Philippe.
He planted his foot on the accelerator, reversing fast, inviting crossfire and an explosion of rear windscreen onto the parcel shelf. The pair of us ducked low, Philippe holding the wheel straight and hoping for the best. We slammed into one of the jeeps behind. I lurched forward but the belt caught tight against my scar. Ow, ow, triple ow! I wish that would stop happening.
We shoved our way through the barricade. Philippe knocked the gear into DRIVE and spun the wheel full lock to the right.
We made a dash for it, a convoy of jeeps opening fire, bullets fizzing all around us. One ricocheted off the inside of the cabin, tearing a hole in the dash. Far too close for comfort.
I could see the front barrier in the distance, no more than half a mile away.
A military Humvee cut in front of us with a large rectangular canon worked by a soldier on the back. The end of the canon lit up neon blue. I expected an explosion. The Mazda flipping over in a ball of fire. The pair of us mashed into human corned beef at the very least. Instead, the lights on the dash began to blink. Everything fizzled out and the engine died. Suddenly, we were free-wheeling.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Pulse canon,” Philippe said. “Knocks out the engine and all the electronics.”
The Mazda drifted to the right and coasted to a standstill. Within seconds, the chasing pack had surrounded us. Philippe stepped out with his hands on his head. I followed his lead.
The soldiers knocked us down to our knees, cuffed us round the wrists and ankles, lifting us onto the back of a jeep each, throwing a few kicks and punches in for good measure. One of the soldiers grabbed a boob as well, licking his lips. I spat back and he raised his rifle to hit me in the head. His commanding officer grabbed the weapon off him and shouted him down.
The jeeps hot-tailed it back out to the runway, a gun to my temple. The military cargo plane, big enough to carry King Kong, had turned around by the time we slammed to a stop, the loading-bay door just kissing the ground. A twenty-strong guy-and-girl mix tramped out onto the tarmac. They formed two orderly lines either side of the loading-bay ramp. All kitted out in special-ops black. Me, Philippe and a groggy Su were lined up on our knees on the runway.
Nasty Nathan waltzed down the cargo ramp with a thermos of coffee in hand. What else? Who else?
#shouldaknown
“Morning, morning!” he shouted over the high whine of the mammoth turbine engines, wind tugging at his khaki pants.
“Need a lift home?” he asked, high on himself.
He waved a hand and said something else in Chinese. We were uncuffed and pushed up the ramp onto the plane, Nathan leading the way.
“I have to thank the both of you for hand-delivering Minister Su,” he said. “The guard you spared will make an excellent scapegoat when the story breaks,” Nathan checked his watch, “oh, say, any time now.”
“What? You mean you’re not gonna pin this on me too?” I asked.
The cargo bay was like the belly of a whale, only dry and lit hell-mouth red. Mesh seats lined either side of the fuselage.
“I would but, unfortunately, you were buried last week,” Nathan said. “And there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a dead person.”
Nathan put on a look of faux sympathy. “Your funeral was a little low on numbers, I’m afraid. Your Auntie Claire had a good turnout, though. We picked out a beautiful headstone. I think you would have approved.”
I wanted to attack him, kill him. Yank out his throat and crush it in my fist. Philippe put a hand on my shoulder, sensing I was about to make a move.
Nathan gestured to a seat on the left of the cargo hold for me and a seat opposite for Philippe. “Please, make yourselves comfortable,” he said. “We’ve got a long flight ahead of us.”
He plonked himself down next to me. Like usual, he stunk of coffee, cigarettes and evil.
“I have to say, Philippe,” he said, as his troops filed back onto the plane, “I’m disappointed you came at all. I thought I’d taught you better than that.”
Nathan leaned into me, nudging me with his shoulder. “Millions of dollars in training, years of sharpening his instincts and you blunt the man inside a few weeks. Remarkable.”
JPAC troops took their seats, wedging us in from all sides.
“Still, we have to be careful around Mr Vazquez,” Nathan said, wagging a finger at an unblinking Philippe. “He may seem docile right now, but give him an inch and he’ll snatch the life right out of us.”
The loading ramp closed and with it the last sight of the Taiwan sky. The plane taxied briefly before the engines kicked in and we rattled our way off the ground, a horrible, gut-churning feeling. How did something so heavy even get off the ground?
The flight was long, loud, cold and cramped. A big Native American dude next to me insisted on sitting with his tree-trunk legs so wide I had to press my knees together the whole journey. Why did guys do that? Like their cock and balls were so big they had whole moons orbiting them.
“No in-flight movies, I’m afraid,” Nathan said to me, loving every minute of whatever this was.
Where were we even headed?
I bet it wasn’t Ibiza.
27
Spider's Web
Ibiza it wasn’t. The Alaskan wilderness it was.
We were re-cuffed and marched off the plane. This was new tarmac. A spanking new airstrip.
I blinked into the bright white sky. The sun got up early around here. The airstrip sat at the foot of a mountain range dusted in snow. The rest was endless forest, no doubt chock-full of things that would bite, rip or sting you to death given half a chance. Were they going to take us into the trees and shoot us? Or feed us to the wolves? Unlikely they’d fly us halfway round the world for that. Our rides turned up within seconds. Four heavy-duty Humvees in green and grey camouflage. Me and Philippe rode on the back of the two pick-up style versions, sandwiched in the middle of the convoy. The airstrip fed into the widest road I’ve ever seen, seven lanes on either side of a concrete barrier, the forest cleared all the way up to the mountain.
It was a clean couple of miles on the road. The mountain towered above like something Greek gods would live on, the peak disappearing into low-lying clouds.
We were doing eighty or ninety along the highway, engines roaring.
“The road’s brand new,” Nathan shouted, sitting on the bench across from me, his knees knocking annoyingly against mine.
“Feel that?” he said.
“No.”
“Exactly. Not even a bump. Smooth as caramel.”
“Not being funny,” I said, “but your driver does know there’s a mountain in the way?”
“Just watch,” he said, impressed with his tiny little self.
As we got in close, the mountain swallowed us whole, highway and all. A tunnel. Big. Mega. Effing mega and bathed in blue light by thousands of thin strip lights lining the arching rock roof. The road dipped down, before levelling off and leading us to a security checkpoint. We glided on through and pull
ed into a hangar the size of three football stadiums, packed with trucks, tanks, planes, choppers, jeeps, you name it.
“Welcome to Disneyland,” Nathan said. “They don’t normally issue guest passes. Luckily for you, my boss wants to meet you.”
“Big whoo,” I said, which seemed to get his goat. Like I was shitting all over his psychopathic dreams.
The Humvees parked up side by side. Me and Philippe were turfed off the back and reunited.
“You didn’t mention an underground lair,” I said to Philippe. “I thought these guys didn’t do HQs.”
“Typical JPAC,” he said. “They never tell you anything.”
“We don’t let assets near the important stuff,” Nathan said as we walked and talked. “What they don’t know can’t be beaten out of them. Besides,” he continued, as we passed a vast row of pristine military vehicles, “Type A’s have a habit of breaking things.”
Just before a bank of four giant elevators, there was a space cordoned off with a red rope. In that space sat something awfully familiar. Mobutu’s platinum Hummer, spotless and gleaming. Next to it, a promotional glass stand with a key fob inside, complete with a tombola and an exhibition stand with the headline: Buy a ticket. Drive away the beast.
Nathan caught me gawping at it. “It’s a little over the top for my tastes,” he said. “We’ve had it in storage for a while. Thought we’d give it away as part of a staff competition. Celebrate the new facility and all that … It’ll need de-weaponising, of course.”
We entered one of the elevators, the size of a studio apartment. Our entourage of soldiers shuffled in around us. Nathan pushed a button that said H. The elevator was silent and felt motionless, yet it raced through the numbers on the digital display. I didn’t know who the guilty party was, but some smelly bastard let off a trump – a short little parp that stunk like a bad egg.
I looked up at the four six-footers guarding me, all giving it the dead-ahead eyes.
“Anyone got a gas mask?” I asked.
Zero reaction. Not even a flicker.
“No?” I said. “Anyone got a sense of humour?”
“That’s what I like about you, Lorna,” Nathan said. “In all this trouble and still joking around.”
“Well,” I said, “if you can’t laugh on the way to your own inevitable doom, when can you?”
Truth is, brave-face humour was my go-to setting. I’d spent years honing the skill in Dr J’s office, batting away grim news with a nervous laugh and a wobbly smile. We hit Level H. A hundred floors up. The doors slid open.
“Welcome to the Hive,” said Nathan, like a proud father. “Forgive us if we’re still at sixes and sevens. The paint’s barely dry.”
“Good,” Philippe said under his breath, making no sense at all.
We stepped out into what looked like a giant hi-tech cave – walls and ceilings of solid, craggy grey rock clashing with white flooring and glass walls dividing meeting rooms and offices with boxes still unpacked. The cuffs around our wrists were replaced with a black ring of hard rubber around each wrist. Like festival bands. They self-tightened to the skin, then snapped my wrists together as if magnetised. Only the best tech for JPAC.
“Come on,” Nathan said, already striding ahead. “A quick tour and then we’ll meet the boss.”
A tall, transparent hexagonal pod looked out over the entire Hive floor, in all directions. Nathan took us up there first, courtesy of a heavy-duty steel staircase on the nearside of the pod.
“This is our Command and Control Centre,” he said. “Or at least one of them.”
Nathan said hello to the guard on the door and swiped us in with a security ID card. We circled around the back of the room, full of big-screen monitors and rows of standing desks manned by people in office-wear.
Nathan hushed his voice. “We’ll need to be quiet,” he said. “We’re in the middle of an operation.”
“There’s the DCL, the Duty Command Leader,” he said, pointing to a buzzcut grandpop, power-stancing in the centre of the room. All around him, people stood at desks, operating super-slim touch-screen monitors, but the headline acts were the elevated screens that ran around the pod: scrolling satellite feeds, streaming data. CNN.
It’s as if they created the news on one screen and watched it reported on another.
Nathan blabbed through the technical ingenuity of it all. Philippe looked genuinely interested, like he was taking mental notes, but when things got too technical, I tended to zone out.
I wondered if they’d been tracking me on big screens like these the whole time. I pictured all my recent nightmares up on those screens and worried about what was to come. As much as no one had tried to stab, shoot or beat us up yet, we were in the heart of the lion’s den, in cuffs. This was just the lion playing with its food. I wanted to get on with it. But there was the rest of Nathan’s little ego trip to get through first.
He led us back out of the pod, through another couple of doors and out onto a giant viewing gallery similar to an airport departure lounge. It looked out over a valley the opposite side of the mountain from the airstrip. I reckoned we were a third of the way up the mountain itself. Directly below, stretching for a cool, square mile, was a complicated mesh of antennas and shiny metal coil structures. They looked tiny from up here, yet they must have been the height of wind turbines or skyscrapers.
Beyond the mesh sat a vast, crystal-clear lake. Beyond that, more trees and mountains as far as the eye could strain.
Yup, when it came to building stuff, nature was the best architect. Hands down.
“What is that?” Philippe asked, slack-jawed, stepping closer to the window. “Another HAARP?”
Nathan looked at me, excited. “He’s clever isn’t he? Always was one of my sharper blunt instruments … HAARP was just a prototype. We kept it going for a while as a distraction,” Nathan said. “This,” he continued, “this is the Spider’s Web.”
I snorted. “The Spider’s Web. The Hive. Does everything have to have a brand name?”
Nathan seemed put out. “I was on the naming committee,” he said. “We had a vote. A launch party.”
Philippe shook his head in disbelief.
Nathan carried on regardless. “It emits microwave frequencies into the ionosphere, much like HAARP, only it’s a hundred times more powerful. Maybe two hundred, I forget.”
“So it screws up the weather?” I asked, remembering what Giles had told me. (Well, some of it.)
“Amongst other things,” Nathan said, checking his watch. “We’re getting ready to activate it today. Any time now.”
“Where are you targeting?” Philippe asked.
Nathan laughed like we were stupid. “Where aren’t we targeting?”
I looked at Philippe. He looked at me. We both stared out at the Spider’s Web, chills multi-fricking-plying.
Nathan took a call on his phone. His boss was ready to see us.
28
Meet Teddy Tucker
Remember my desert dream? Something told me this was the guy talking on the other end of the Skype call, just before the beheading. He wasn’t cast in shadow. His voice wasn’t distorted. It was more the words he used. And the way he used them when he spoke. Plus, the general shape of his head was the same. A big, square wedge of a head. He sat at a walnut boardroom table, scraping a knife and fork across a plate in a way that made me want to claw the skin off my face. Egg whites and grilled tomatoes, with tea and brown-toast triangles in a rack. A cloth napkin tucked into his shirt collar.
We stood in the doorway of the meeting room alongside Nathan, waiting for the man to finish chewing and acknowledge us.
Eventually, he did.
“Ah, welcome,” he said. “Take a seat, won’t you?”
“Pardon my eating,” he said. “I just caught a Red Eye in and it’s a big day. Can I get you anything? The food here ain’t half bad.”
We shook our heads. He was another of these grinning, mannered maniacs, tanned to the eyeballs and h
alf a stone heavier in gold rings and cufflinks. The one thing I’d figured out from this whole experience: evil wears a smile. It’s hard to stay mad at and too easy to trust.
“I’m Teddy Tucker, Senator Teddy Tucker. But y’all can call me Teddy,” the mystery man said. “Now, I know who you are,” he said to Philippe. “Who in the world are you, little lady?”
As usual, I felt like an imposter in my own life. Like I shouldn’t have been there.
Nathan spoke for me. “This is Lorna Walker. She’s the girl who found the list.”
“Ah,” he said. “So this is the mighty Ms Walker. The splinter in our pinkie.”
Tucker sipped his tea and chuckled. “Look at the two of you. The odd couple. I applaud your endeavour. Especially a girl with your medical condition, Lorna. I wish we had a hundred more people like you. However,” he said, removing his napkin and dabbing the corners of his mouth, “this will be the end of the road for y’all both, I’m afraid.”
“So what are we sitting here for?” Philippe asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “why not just bump us off in Taiwan?”
Tucker dumped the napkin on the plate and leaned forward on his elbows. He locked his fat, manicured fingers together. “Because I wanna know why a committee operative of …” He turned to ask Nathan. “How long has Mr Vasquez been a live asset? Twenty-three years?”
Nathan nodded. “About that, yeah.”
“Then why, after all this time, one of my best attack dogs turns on a dime and bites the hand that feeds,” said Tucker.
“We want to know if there’s a flaw in our brain training,” Nathan added. “Something we need to address.”
Philippe didn’t answer. Twenty-three years? Jesus. That would have made him my age when he started.
“Y’know, Nathan and I thought you’d hidden the list to protect the committee, but you didn’t, did y’all?”
Still not a peep out of Philippe.
Nathan jumped in. “Why did you hide it?”