Trapped

by Isla Whitcroft

  Mentally crossing her fingers that she had picked the right option, Cate walked casually through the garden and then increased her pace once she was out of sight of the tables. She hoped she hadn’t left it too long, that she hadn’t already lost Bill before she had even started following him. To her relief, as she came out onto a quiet residential street, she saw him in the distance.

  ‘I’m getting used to this,’ said Cate grimly to herself, as she first checked behind her to see that no one else was following either her or Bill.

  Bill showed no sign of being uneasy or nervous. He walked purposefully but without rushing, and Cate started to think she should have been keeping an eye on someone else.

  But still she stuck to Bill, tracking him down the long street, which was edged with high houses all shuttered up against the bright afternoon sun, and then out onto a main road.

  To her left she could see the harbour, glimpses of the bright blue sea visible through the numerous small parks and trees. But rather than head for the harbour and the shops, Bill took a right fork and began to walk briskly and purposefully up the hill and away from the town centre. It was harder now to keep him in her sights; the cars, motorbikes and pedestrians that thronged the busy tarmac road were obscuring her view and the cafés spilling out onto the pavements created a natural obstacle course. Cate had to jog to avoid losing him.

  There was probably an innocent explanation, thought Cate to herself. Most likely he was heading for some kind of engineering workshop. The commercial road gradually faded away to be replaced by a shabby street with boarded-up offices and locked-up graffitied garages and then, suddenly, Bill stopped, outside a nondescript prefab building with painted panels that had the air of a small abandoned school.

  Cate darted to the opposite side of the road and pressed herself into a small alleyway that ran between two old garages. The air was baking hot and chokingly dusty. Cate caught the whiff of stale oil and, as she looked behind her, she could see the alley was littered with old engine parts. That was it – he must be searching out an obscure engine part.

  Bill knocked on a door that was set into a grubby white wall surrounding the property and, within seconds, it was opened by a man who stepped out into the street to shake his hand. Cate did a double take, hardly believing her eyes. There was no mistake, no forgetting that long lank hair. Standing just a few metres away from her, being greeted by Bill, was one of the men who had beaten Andrei half to death. She strained her ears to hear what they were saying and her heart sank. They were talking in Russian, both men chatting like natives.

  ‘I can only speak Australian.’ She remembered Bill standing in front of her on her very first day aboard Catwalk II, his face open and honest. The best type of liar. Could Bill really be one of the bad guys? It seemed almost beyond belief.

  Suddenly a thought struck her. Perhaps Bill was investigating Nancy, too, either working for Marcus, like her, or even on his own. Cate knew she might well be clutching at straws but despite herself her spirits rose. She would watch and wait, and not jump to any conclusions.

  The gate was propped open now, the lank-haired man leaning against it while Bill went inside. Five minutes, ten minutes passed while Cate grew increasingly anxious. Something wasn’t right, she could sense it. The lank-haired man was nervy, chain-smoking, looking up and down the street and at the deserted buildings around him as if he feared he was being watched. At one point he turned and started to walk back into the building but then changed his mind and came out and resumed his manic pacing. Then he disappeared around the corner of the house and came back, pushing a large moped.

  Even from her hiding place, Cate could sense his fear and now she was frightened too. She was sure something evil was about to happen, and she knew with certainty that she couldn’t stop it. Suddenly there was a loud, muffled bang and the lank-haired man jerked his head almost involuntarily towards the house. A few minutes later Bill appeared, carrying a bright blue laptop under his arm, and nodded at his companion. Wordlessly, the lank-haired man gunned the moped. Bill pulled the gate shut behind him with a slam, secured it with a thick chain and padlock, and still clutching the laptop, hopped on behind him.

  The dark blue machine was U-turning in the street, passing Cate at speed as it headed towards town. She watched as the bike disappeared in a cloud of dust. She could never hope to follow them and, for a few seconds, she felt like screaming and stamping in frustration.

  She didn’t allow herself to rant for long. That wasn’t going to achieve anything. It was time to do a bit of exploring but first she needed a weapon and she wished for a second she had brought the gun. She eyed up the rubbish littering the ground behind her and spotted a thick metal pipe half hidden in the stringy grass. She pulled it out gratefully, dislodging two very surprised lizards as she did so, and gripped it tightly. It was perfect – just the right weight for her to carry, but heavy enough to inflict damage if necessary.

  She watched the house across the road for a full five minutes. It seemed silent and empty, there was no movement from behind the boarded-up windows. She scanned the eaves and the roof but couldn’t see any cameras.

  Finally, plucking up the courage to move, Cate checked that the road was clear, and, her hands slippery with nervous sweat, left the alleyway and crossed the road to the gate. The metal pipe made quick work of the padlock and Cate was through the gate and into the relative safety of the doorway. She paused for a breather and to try to still her nerves, listening to see if anyone had heard her, but there was complete silence. Even the birds don’t sing here, thought Cate, and shuddered slightly.

  She looked closely at the door, trying to size up what was keeping it shut. There was no visible lock, no obvious means of opening it up. She brought out the tiny tin that Marcus had given her. He had been thorough as he went through the list of equipment in the tin: ‘An electromagnet for causing mayhem with computers, a tiny laser which will cut through metal, a data stick – with data card reader and a spare data card – with enough capacity to copy a NASA hard drive.’

  She picked out the small hyper magnet. As she flicked the switch she felt the power surge through the tiny piece of metal, and it was all she could do to hang onto it before it escaped from her grasp. She placed it quietly on the door and slid it methodically from side to side, trying to work out where the lock was. Almost instantly it fixed onto the centre of the door where it clung like a limpet.

  Gotcha, thought Cate triumphantly. She turned the tiny dial on the top of the magnet up to its highest setting. If the lock on the other side was controlled by any form of digital software, the magnet would scramble it and make it useless.

  The gadget didn’t let her down. Cate pushed gently on the door and it opened without protest into a dark, dingy corridor containing a staircase and not much else.

  Clutching her weapon, she moved silently up the small, bare staircase. She reached the landing and paused, listening again, but there was nothing.

  At the end of the landing, by a small boarded-up window which would once have looked out onto the street, stood a stained door which was covered with filth of every description, including something which looked horribly like blood. Cate noted two parallel gouges running down the side of the door. Were they claw marks? Something or someone had put up a good fight for their freedom.

  Cate pushed at the old door. It wasn’t locked. She found herself in a long room, the only light coming from a few chinks in the boarded-up windows. On the opposite wall stood barred cages stacked floor to ceiling, some large enough for a man, others not much bigger than a shoe box. The animals had obviously been kept here. No wonder the gang had chosen this virtually deserted district to house the animals. Even if anyone did hear them, it looked exactly the type of area where everyone minded their own business anyway.

  Cate began methodically checking each of the cages, but they were empty, cleared out. Whatever creatures had been confined here had been moved elsewhere and Cate felt a hopelessness overwhelm her.r />
  She took out her phone, and began taking pictures of the room, of the cages and the boarded windows. As she did so, she realised that there was a door at the far end of the room. Cate cursed herself for not being smart enough to check her surroundings before she started searching the cages. Anyone could be behind that door. She had put herself at risk and was lucky that so far she hadn’t had to pay the price for her carelessness.

  She was frightened now, her breathing coming in short shallow gasps. For a second, she considered fleeing back to the restaurant, but she knew that she had to keep trying to track down those poor, trapped animals.

  As she reached the door, she had a sudden vision of Bill coming out of the house carrying the laptop with the air of a man who had just finished a job. She remembered the dull thump, the lank-haired man’s frantic nervousness and the way both men had clearly been desperate to get away from the house.

  Cate gently opened the door. This room was brightly lit, a stainless steel and white model of pristine cleanliness. Suddenly Cate knew exactly what she was going to find and for a minute her courage nearly failed her.

  Everything was immaculate, like the science lab at Cate’s school only bigger and better. Microscopes were lined up neatly on the metal worktops next to petri dishes and piles of needles and spatulas still wrapped in their plastic packaging. Clearly no expense had been spared. There were centrifugal machines and ovens, blood-washing machines and numerous fridges with thermometers that measured in fractions of degrees.

  A dark-haired man was sitting behind a desk at the far end of the room. His deep set eyes, one brown, one blue, seemed to watch Cate as she went towards him, but he didn’t move. Down the left side of his distinctive beak-like nose a small trickle of blood was already coagulating, but enough had spilled down to form a pool of darkness which was still spreading over his white-coated arm and onto the floor below.

  As she walked determinedly towards him, Cate had the strangest feeing that he was desperately trying to say something to her, that he was not yet gone from this world. But even if he had wanted to talk, it was clear that, as Cate touched his still-warm hand, it was all too late for that. Professor Mantanini had been silenced forever.

  CHAPTER 10

  Looking back on it later, Cate was amazed that she didn’t scream. Instead, almost on autopilot, she began taking more pictures, walking steadily and carefully around the body, making sure that she covered every angle. ‘Sorry,’ she found herself murmuring to the dead man, feeling guilty that she was invading his privacy. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered again as she almost tripped over an outstretched foot.

  She had no idea why she was so calm. Although she had seen plenty of dead bodies on TV and in films and a few on the roads driving through a war zone in a UN convoy, this was different. Perhaps it was because he was only just dead. Perhaps because she was the first person to find him after he had died. She had heard the sound of the shot as he was murdered and now she felt attached to him, responsible for him even. She knew she would be haunted by the sight of him forever.

  Cate was just about to call Marcus and tell him what she had found, when she smelt the first wafts of something sickly and sinister. She stopped what she was doing and sniffed the air, trying to work out what it was. The smell hit her like a wave, making her head spin. It was getting stronger, and now she could hear a low, hissing sound behind her. Gas, she thought with a gut-wrenching lurch of terror. The room is filling with gas.

  She looked around frantically, following the sound, and spotted a tiny pipe that had been wrenched away from the wall behind the professor’s desk. Hidden by a small shelf, Cate guessed that it had been slowly spewing its invisible poison into the air since Bill had left the house. Next to the pipe stood a small metal box on which a digital countdown spiralled towards zero. Cate had heard of this set-up before. In approximately four minutes it would trigger a spark to ignite the gas creating an explosion so huge it would no doubt obliterate the entire building.

  The ultimate clean-up job, she thought grimly. To blow the whole place to kingdom come and hope that no one would ever find the body. Or if they did, it would be pretty much impossible to identify.

  Her first reaction was to preserve the evidence of the horror in the room, and to do that she had to at least try to disarm the bomb. She reached for the magnet, sliding the lid off the survival kit with a shaking finger. Then she paused, suddenly cold with fear. What if the magnet sent the countdown haywire instead of stopping it, and tripped the device while she was standing over it?

  By now she was feeling nauseous, her legs wobbly and weak, her mind a hazy mush of thoughts and emotions but she knew that now, more than ever, she needed to concentrate. There was certainly no point in freaking out or screaming for help. The only person who could keep her alive was herself. She had to get out of there!

  She started to run, but her knees buckled beneath her after just a few metres. Gasping for breath, she crawled on her knees towards the door, her hands scrabbling desperately on the tiled floor for grip to pull her along. But any progress she made was agonisingly slow, it took at least a minute to make it to the first doorway and Cate knew that at this rate she had no chance of getting out of the building before the bomb went off.

  With tears streaming down her face, she tried to pull her phone from her pocket. It was too late to call for help, she knew that, but she wanted to hear Arthur’s voice to tell him that she loved him and to say goodbye. But, as she did so, her hand banged against the survival tin and she forced her mind back to the instructions Marcus had given her.

  She could see him now, handing over the tin and shaking hands with her solemnly, finalising her agreement that she would do as he asked and spy on Nancy.

  What on earth had she been thinking? That she, Cate Carlisle, a sixteen-year-old who had spent most of the last year revising for her GSCEs, could outwit experienced hardened criminals, men who thought nothing of assassinating witnesses and planting bombs? Was she now in danger of breaking the record for being the shortest-lived agent in the entire history of spying?

  As she sprawled exhausted on the cold floor, Cate was laughing and crying at the same time, tears rolling down her cheeks. It must be the gas, thought Cate, making another huge effort to force herself to focus through the mental fog that was now threatening to overwhelm her.

  Try to remember. There had been something that Marcus had laughed about when he showed her how it worked. ‘This one’s for fun,’ he had said. ‘This one is real secret agent stuff. And I promise that at the end of the summer you get to keep it as a souvenir.’

  Of course, Cate thought, as she remembered the package she’d also been given. The projectile pulley. She nearly laughed out loud again as she pulled it out of her bag. At least before she died she would get to use a real-life spy gadget.

  She fumbled clumsily in the semi-darkness and found the tiny fibreglass grip, aimed it at one of the chinks in the window boards and pressed the black firing button. The hook, with a thin wire attached to it, shot out with a power so strong that her arm was wrenched forward, causing a sharp pain to shoot through her shoulder focusing her mind and lifting the fug slightly. Cate held her breath and squinted at the window, but then her heart sank – she had missed her target, the hook had fallen short of the window and was lying uselessly on the floor.

  Grunting with effort, she pressed the green button. The pulley self-wound, bringing the hook back with it and Cate, using her left hand to hold her trembling right one steady, fired again. This time she saw the hook disappear through the chink in the boards and smash the window. She tugged on it desperately and felt it come back on itself, holding fast against the boards.

  She pulled harder in a final test, then, uttering a silent prayer that the hook would hold her weight, grabbed tightly with both hands, pressed the green button and in an instant was dragged at speed across the floor of the room towards the window. She removed the boards and pushed up the broken sash, gratefully gulping lungs full of fres
h air.

  Outside the sun was still blazing and the sky a bright blue, the tattered buildings opposite sharp in the sunlight. But she was still ten metres above the street with only seconds to go before the bomb exploded. Desperately she swung her legs out onto the sill and looked down to the concrete paving below. Her heart sank. There was nothing beneath her to cushion her fall and if she broke a leg or an ankle she would be left there like a wounded animal, unable to run for cover from the explosion. Then she remembered the pulley. She grabbed the hook and passed it back through the window, scrabbling around until it caught on the sill. ‘I’m out of time,’ she told herself. ‘It’s now or never.’

  Holding the pulley tight, she said a quick prayer, pressed the black button and jumped. The pulley whizzed out above her and then, with a jerk, stopped dead, leaving Cate hanging just a metre above the ground. The relief that she wasn’t plastered all over the concrete gave her a sudden burst of power. Kicking off from the wall, she jumped over the fence letting go of the wire and rolling as she hit the ground. She sprinted across the road, reaching the cover of the alleyway just as the building blew up into the clear blue sky.

  Cate hadn’t expected the noise. It was so loud that for a few seconds it deafened her, leaving her head ringing with pain. Instinctively, she ducked as a fireball rolled along the street, followed by a cloud of debris which blotted out the sun and left her choking and gasping for breath. But she was alive. Alive. Even the ash that was falling in thick layers on her skin felt wonderful – proof that she had, against all the odds, survived.

  Then there was silence. Cate wasn’t quite sure what she had expected. Shouts maybe, frightened neighbours running out into the street, sirens wailing. But there was nothing, except a few dogs barking in the distance and the gentle breeze rustling in the trees.

  She looked down and groaned. Her clothes were blackened and ripped, her legs and stomach covered in grazes from where she had clambered through the window and rolled across the concrete ground. People would take one look at her and call either an ambulance or the men in white coats or probably both. She could call Marcus but it would be too long before he got help to her.