by Stuart Gibbs
Erica swerved left. The road turned out to be a one-way street, but thankfully, we were going the right direction. Unfortunately, the road had been built well before anyone had ever imagined there could possibly be a vehicle as large as a bus. It was old and cobblestoned and there were cars parked along both sides. There was barely enough room for the bus to squeeze through them. Erica did her best to thread the needle, but it was an impossible job, even for her. We clipped several cars, smashing off rearview mirrors, gouging deep gashes in the vehicles’ paint, and sending up showers of sparks as metal ground against metal.
“Next time I ask you where to go,” Erica said through gritted teeth, “try to remember I’m driving a bus, not a bicycle.”
“So,” Zoe said to Catherine, a few rows back. “Why do you think this Orion fellow won’t decrypt that flash drive for us?”
Catherine arched an eyebrow at her. “You want to discuss this now?”
“Looks like Erica has things under control,” Zoe said, then winced as the bus jumped a curb and flattened a bike rack. “More or less. We might as well deal with our other problems.”
Catherine considered this a moment, then gave in. “Orion doesn’t work cheap. He charges in the millions. And right now I’m guessing we’ve only got a few hundred quid on us. Plus, if Orion did do this for Joshua, he’ll never undo it. That’s not his way.”
“Then let’s not ask nicely,” Erica said, blowing through a red light. “Let’s make him do it. The security of the free world is at stake.”
A street vendor wheeling a fruit cart across the road from us abandoned his wares and ran for his life. The cart exploded as the bus plowed into it, splattering the front windshield with smoothie.
“Which way now?” Erica asked me.
I had made no progress with the map at all. Not only were the streets impossible to figure out, but they seemed to change names every block. “Right?” I suggested.
Erica went that way, smashing through a sidewalk café that thankfully hadn’t opened for dinner yet. The road we ended up on was much wider—but it turned out to be only for pedestrians. Everyone scattered, diving for cover in storefronts as we plowed through it all.
“I’m all for forcing Orion’s hand,” Catherine said. “But we can’t make him do anything if we can’t get to him. And we can’t get to him.”
“Why not?” Mike asked. “Don’t you know where to find him?”
“Oh, I know exactly where to find him,” Catherine said. “MI6 has used his services before. The problem is, his home is a fortress. We won’t be able to get inside unless he wants us to, and unless we’re paying, he won’t want us to.”
“Why’s it so hard to get inside?” Alexander asked. “Are there guards?”
Catherine shook her head. “Orion doesn’t use guards. Guards are human, and humans are fallible. He’s designed his own security instead. Every door, window, and vent is protected by six separate systems, each with its own shifting eighteen-digit entry code. The only person smart enough to figure out how to get inside Orion’s house is Orion himself.”
The three police cars were managing to stay in pursuit of us despite the wreckage we were leaving behind. And another three dropped in behind them, joining the chase.
“Excuse me,” an exceptionally polite bus rider seated behind Erica said, “but you seem to have passed my stop. And the next four stops after that. I don’t suppose you could let me off at Waterloo Junction?”
“Sorry, old chum,” Murray told him pleasantly. “This is an express bus now.”
“Orion must leave his home on occasion,” Zoe was saying to Catherine. “Can’t we wait for him to do that and approach him then?”
“There are a few problems with that,” Catherine said. “I suspect that Orion certainly leaves on occasion, but that happens rarely and he is extremely clandestine about it. MI6 has been watching his home for years and we have never seen him go in or out his own door. We suspect he has a secret entrance that we have never found the access point for. Furthermore, we don’t know what he looks like.”
“But you’ve worked with him,” Alexander said.
“We’ve used him,” Catherine corrected. “That doesn’t mean we’ve ever seen him. Orion never presents himself to his visitors. He doesn’t even let them into his home. All contact is conducted electronically. So there is no way to reach him if he doesn’t want to be reached. And I can guarantee you he doesn’t want us to reach him, especially with our current high profile.”
We were coming to the end of the pedestrian promenade. “Which way?” Erica asked once more.
I had completely given up on the map. All I could do was guess a direction and pray it worked. “Left,” I said.
Erica went that way.
I gulped in alarm. I couldn’t possibly have guessed worse. Not only was this road so old and narrow that it looked like it had been laid by the Normans, but up ahead of us was a narrow arch where a train track crossed the road.
I made some estimates, did some quick calculations, and didn’t like what I came up with.
The double-decker bus wasn’t going to fit under the arch. Even if it had had only one level, the arch wouldn’t have been wide enough to accommodate it.
The six police cars came around the corner behind us, boxing us in.
“Nice going, Ben,” Murray said sarcastically, failing to hide his concern. “You led us right into a trap.”
I couldn’t even respond, because I knew Murray’s words were true. I had failed miserably at my job.
Erica didn’t chastise me, though. She didn’t brake, either. Instead, she sped up.
“Erica,” Murray said. “This bus won’t fit through that.”
“I don’t have any intention of fitting this bus through it,” Erica replied. “Crash positions, everyone!”
Everyone took cover, tucking into tight balls.
The bus sped into the arch…and jammed fast in the middle of it. There was a horrible rending noise, and the metal sparked as it scraped on the stone. We came to a dead stop, like a cork jammed into a bottle.
Erica calmly delivered a karate kick to the front windshield. As it was designed for emergency exits, the window popped out easily and smashed onto the cobblestones in front of us.
The six police cars screeched to a stop behind us. The bus was now blocking the way through the arch, wedged in so tightly, a mouse couldn’t even get through.
Erica slipped out through the space where the windshield had just been and dropped to the street in front of the bus. “Escape route,” she said proudly, then looked to me. “Very clever of you to realize that would work, Ben.”
I smiled weakly, doing my best to make it look like this had all been my idea.
The rest of us filed out after Erica, ignoring the complaints of the bus riders. With the bus preventing the police and MI6 from coming after us, we hurried down the road half a block to the closest Tube station and descended into the subway.
“Does Orion have a dog?” Mike asked.
The question was so out of the blue, it caught Catherine—and all the rest of us—by surprise.
“A dog?” Alexander asked, confused.
“Yes,” Mike answered. “It’s a four-legged mammal. Comes in all shapes and sizes. Likes to lick its own private parts. Lots of people have them as pets. If Orion has one, then I know how to get into his house.”
Zoe grinned at Mike, fluttering her eyelashes again, seriously impressed by his ability to come up with a plan yet again.
“As I recall, Orion has three dogs,” Catherine said to Mike. “So what shall we do?”
8 VEHICLE ACQUISITION
Somewhere in the London Underground
March 31
1200 hours
There were more security cameras in London than in any other city in the world: hundreds of thousands, recording everything. I noticed dozens in the subway station alone as we hustled through it. “MI6 and the London Police are certainly scanning the feeds from every last one of them
,” Catherine warned us. “So we’re going to have to move fast and stay out of sight.”
Luckily, Catherine had a great deal of knowledge about how the cameras worked—which meant she also had some very good ideas on how to avoid them.
The first trick was to hop a train in the Underground, knowing full well that we’d be recorded getting on it—and then hop off before it got to the next station. I had my concerns about this when Catherine first suggested it, but it turned out to be easier than I’d expected. (Or at least it was easier than dropping out of the Tower Bridge and then racing a double-decker bus through the city; sometimes what you considered easy was all a matter of experience.)
We all positioned ourselves at the rear end of the subway car, where Catherine dismantled the alarm on the emergency exit. When the train slowed to a near crawl to make a tight turn, we popped the door open and leapt out into the tunnel.
It turned out there was a massive network of tunnels underneath the streets of London: not just subway tubes, but maintenance tunnels for the tubes, sewer lines, routes to access the power lines, gas mains, and a thousand other things that had been buried down there. There were so many passages that many appeared to have been forgotten. “People have been digging their way through here ever since the Romans,” Catherine explained as she led us along. “There are some people who can get from one end of this city to the other without ever poking their heads aboveground.”
Catherine was not one of those people. She didn’t know much of the system at all, except a few choice routes under MI6 headquarters, which we were quite a long way from. Still, there were no cameras down below, and we were able to work our way from one tunnel to another for quite a way until we ran out of options. We ended up in a shaft that simply led upward, so we climbed the metal rungs bolted into the ancient concrete along the sides and emerged through a manhole into a radically different part of London than we had first descended from.
This part was far less touristy. Instead, it seemed like the sort of place that tourists’ guidebooks would specifically warn you to steer clear of, unless you wanted to spend the rest of your vacation in either a police station or a hospital. There were no brand-new shiny steel-and-glass buildings or exciting attractions. Instead, there were a staggering number of run-down pubs. Although all the pubs looked like the type of place you might be stabbed for merely asking directions, each had a bizarrely cheerful, somewhat cryptic name: the Knave’s Head, the Tickled Chicken, the Elephant and the Plumber, the Moldy Cheese. Their entire economy appeared to be based on beer.
There weren’t many security cameras, even though this was exactly the sort of place I would normally have been worried about security. Still, we stayed off the main roads and stuck to the smaller alleys, pulled our newfound coats and scarves up around our faces, and kept our heads pointed downward. While this helped keep our faces from being recorded by the few cameras, it also forced us to stay in dimly lit areas filled with shadowy people. I could feel almost everyone we passed glaring at us, as though they were angry at us for even crossing their paths.
All of us were uneasy, but Alexander was the most on edge by far. “We need to get out of here, and fast,” he told Catherine as we passed down a murky alley. “All these men are itching for a fight, and since I’m the alpha male here, they’re going to come for me first.”
“The alpha male?” Catherine asked, amused.
“Yes. It won’t look good for them to attack women or children. So they’ll attack me.”
“And me,” Murray seconded nervously. “I’m definitely the beta male here.”
Catherine seemed to be fighting the urge to laugh. “Don’t worry, heroes. I’m working on some transport.” She stopped suddenly behind a pub called the Pig and Knickers. The alley there smelled as though people vomited in it on a regular basis. Four large men were loitering behind it next to a large beer keg delivery truck. The men looked like they were the ones who did the vomiting on a regular basis. They reeked of beer, even at that early time of day, and glowered as we approached.
Despite the fact that the men were as welcoming as a pack of rabid Dobermans, Catherine smiled at them cheerfully and said, “Hello, gentlemen. I don’t suppose any of you know who owns this lorry? I’d like to rent it.” (I presumed at the time—correctly—that “lorry” meant “truck” in Britain.)
The biggest of the men stepped forward. He was six and a half feet tall and built like a tree. “You got money for the lorry?” he asked, although his accent was so thick, it sounded more like “Oogatch unny cor de orry?”
“I do,” Catherine said brightly. “Quite a lot, in fact.”
Alexander’s and Murray’s eyes both went wide with fear. Mine probably did the same. Catherine’s words were like waving raw meat in front of lions.
The other three thugs perked up in interest. They stepped forward, looming over Catherine. The big one smiled menacingly, revealing gums that were missing half their teeth. “How about this, then, pigeon? You all hand over your money.” Once again it didn’t really sound like that. It barely even sounded like he was speaking English at all.
“That is not what I suggested,” Catherine said sternly. “I am warning you, many of my friends here are from overseas, and you are not making this city look good to them at all.”
With surprising speed, the leader grabbed Catherine’s arm and snapped a large, sharp knife from his belt, which he then pressed against her neck. “Your money,” he repeated.
Mike suddenly burst into laughter.
The four thugs looked at him curiously.
“What’s so funny?” the leader asked.
“You’re mugging her?” Mike asked. “That is a very bad career move.” He didn’t seem the slightest bit nervous about how things were going. Instead, he was amused. He turned around and scanned the alley.
“What’re you looking for?” the leader demanded. He seemed extremely upset that Mike wasn’t properly worried.
“I’m looking for a good place to sit,” Mike said. “So I can watch the show.”
“What show?” the big man asked.
“This one,” Catherine said, and then she attacked.
Until only a few months before, I had thought Erica Hale was the best fighter I had ever seen, but her mother was even more talented. The four thugs were crowded around her and she caught them completely by surprise. Within a second she had wrenched the leader’s arm around, making him whimper in pain and drop his knife. Then she whipped him into his pals, knocking them all back into the brick wall. Before the men even had a chance to realize what was happening, Erica and Zoe had joined the fight as well.
It was like releasing three coyotes into a henhouse. The poor criminals never stood a chance.
Mike had spotted an old crate lying close by. He took a seat on it to watch, just as he’d said he would, then motioned for me to join him. Aware that the three women had far better fighting skills than me and that if I tried to help I’d only get in the way, I sat down too. Murray quickly joined us, pulling up a crate of his own.
The battle didn’t last long. The women were quick and talented, while the men were slow and dull. Every time one of the thugs tried to land a blow, they hit nothing but air, while the women made each punch and kick count.
Alexander looked uneasy about the whole thing, like he really ought to be helping out instead of letting the women do all the fighting. However, Alexander was even worse at fighting than I was. He tried to punch one of the thugs in the face but missed when Zoe decked the guy instead and ended up driving his fist right into a brick wall. Alexander staggered backward, howling in pain, tripped over yet another thug (whom Erica had just rendered unconscious), and tumbled into a pile of trash that had been set out for pickup.
It was over in less than a minute. The thugs, who had appeared so tough and menacing, were all sprawled on the cobblestones, either out cold or clutching wounded body parts and whimpering. The leader was curled in the fetal position, wide-eyed with fear and di
sbelief. He cringed as Catherine loomed over him.
“Now, then,” Erica’s mother said, “on behalf of all the English, I believe you owe these people an apology for your behavior.”
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” the leader said meekly. “Please don’t let the poor conduct of my friends and myself adversely affect your visit to this lovely country.”
At least, that was probably the gist of what he was trying to say. I couldn’t really understand him, given his strong accent and the fact that he’d now lost some more of his teeth and his nose was swollen like a candied apple.
“That’s better,” Catherine said. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to hand over the keys to this van, I’d appreciate it.”
The thug pulled the keys from his pocket as quickly as he could, then passed out from either pain or fear.
Catherine picked them up off the ground, smiled proudly, and said, “Right. Let’s get a move on.”
9 SELF-DOUBT
The Cotswolds, England
March 31
1800 hours
“This can’t be right,” Zoe said, staring at Orion’s home in astonishment. “We must have the wrong address.”
“This is the right place,” Catherine said, sounding slightly offended by the idea that she might have made a mistake. “I’ve been here once before.”
“Only one person lives here?” Zoe asked. “This isn’t a house. It’s a palace.”
She spoke the truth. The building we were staring at was even referred to as a palace on our map. Wickham Palace, to be specific. Back in London I had caught a brief glimpse of Buckingham Palace, where the royal family lived. This appeared to be bigger. In fact, it appeared to be larger than most shopping malls I had seen.
Wickham wasn’t even the only palace in the area. We were in a part of the British countryside known as the Cotswolds, about two hours west of London—or five hours west if you got stuck in rush-hour traffic, as we had. According to my map, the Cotswolds were lousy with palaces. There was one every few miles, some of which, Catherine said, were even bigger than Wickham.