Rat-Catcher (2 page)

The black car slowly backed out of the alley and roared off, leaving Eliza sitting in the sudden dark. The air made a harsh noise in her throat as, finally, she took a breath. Marco, her protector, was gone. Eliza thought she would never, ever feel safe again.

T
WO

The Nevada desert, eight months later
. . .

Amber lay flat on her belly and ducked her head behind the scant cover of a yucca plant as the searchlight cut through the darkness. She was lying on the outer limit of the beam's range, but still she felt terribly exposed as the wedge of light swept across the desert towards her. Amber pressed her cheek against the stony ground and a shiver ran through her as the cold bit into her bones. It was six degrees below zero now, but when the helicopter had touched down in the desert earlier that afternoon, she and the other four members of Alpha Force had stepped out into blazing sunshine and temperatures in the high twenties. The Nevada desert in December was a place of extremes.

The edge of the searchlight beam reached her hiding-place, grazing the yucca plant and giving each spiky leaf a temporary shadow. As soon as the beam moved on, Amber checked the luminous dial on her stopwatch. Ninety seconds. Surely that was far too short? She bit her lip, then put the thought out of her head and got on with the business at hand. First, she cocked her head and listened. A hunting owl hooted close by, but otherwise the desert was quiet. Cautiously, Amber raised her head and peered through the yucca leaves. The searchlight beam had temporarily destroyed her natural night vision, so she reached up and pulled her night-vision goggles down over her eyes. The searchlight tower was inside a compound, which lay ahead of her across a flat expanse of pebbly, red ground. Amber activated the goggles and the compound appeared in her sights, bathed in a weird green light. It was a cluster of low, prefabricated buildings, protected by a steel-mesh boundary fence. The fence rose twice as high as a man and it was topped with coils of razor wire. It ran in an unbroken line all round the back of the complex.

Amber stared at the fence, trying to see whether it was electrified. She raised her head above the yucca plant to get a better look and, as she did so, a German Shepherd dog started barking fiercely. Amber slammed back down onto the sand, cursing herself for being so careless. She had been lying behind the yucca bush for twenty minutes, timing the searchlight sweeps and the dog patrols with her stopwatch. She should have known that it was time for the guard and his dog to appear at the rear of the complex again. How could she have been so stupid?

The guard walked towards the fence with the barking dog straining on its lead ahead of him. Amber flattened herself against the ground. She was dressed all in black so she was sure the guard could not see her in the darkness beyond the compound, but something had alerted the dog. The breeze was still blowing her way, so she knew the animal could not have picked up her scent. Did dogs have sharper eyes than people? Had it spotted the movement when she raised her head above the yucca bush? Or maybe the lenses of her night-vision goggles had reflected a glimmer of light?

The guard and the dog had reached the boundary fence. The dog threw itself against the steel mesh, which answered one question for her. The fence was not electrified. The guard switched on a powerful torch and sent the beam zigzagging through the darkness. The beam hit the yucca bush and the dog's barking rose to a crescendo. Amber groaned inwardly. She had blown it. She tensed, preparing to break cover and run for it. Then the owl she had heard earlier burst from the ground a few metres in front of her. It fluttered in the torch beam for a few seconds, blinded by the light, and the dog went into overdrive. The owl recovered itself and glided away, flying low and silent across the desert. The guard let the beam follow it for a few seconds, then he clicked the torch off, dragged the frantic dog away from the fence and continued on his way.

Amber closed her eyes. She was covered in a cold sweat and felt as though she was about to melt into the desert sand with relief. She gave herself a few seconds to recover, then turned and commando-crawled across the stony ground, heading for the cover of the towering, red sandstone mesa that rose from the desert behind her.

Alex, Li, Hex and Paulo, the other four members of Alpha Force, were waiting for Amber on the other side of the mesa. They jumped when she scurried around the corner of the huge rock and flopped down beside them, sending small stones skittering everywhere. They were all dressed in black too, and they had been applying camouflage cream while they waited for her. In the faint starlight they blended almost perfectly into the shadowed rock face. Amber grinned when she saw their anxious eyes blinking out at her from their blackened faces.

'Hey, guys,' she whispered mock-seriously, pointing to the smears of camouflage cream then making dabbing motions at her own face. 'You have a little something, just here . . .'

'Dios Mio,
Amber!' hissed Paulo.

'What?' said Amber coolly.

'We thought you'd been caught,' said Li, tucking a wisp of her long black hair behind her ear.

'What, me?' said Amber. 'Nah. No chance.'

'So, don't tell me,' said Hex, folding his arms and raising his eyebrows at her. 'That dog wasn't barking a warning. It was ordering a pizza.'

'An owl spooked it, that's all. Aww. Were you scared, sweetie? I wasn't.'

'Then why are you sweating?' asked Hex.

Amber swiped at her forehead then glared at Hex. 'I - I got a little hot.'

'Amber,' said Li, 'it's below freezing out here.'

'Yeah, well I wasn't scared, OK? I--'

'Amber,' said Alex quietly, 'can we just focus on the job? What did you find out?'

'Oh, OK. There's good news and bad news. First of all, the dog patrols are about five minutes apart.'

'And the good news?' asked Alex.

'That was the good news,' said Amber, suddenly serious. 'The bad news is, the searchlight sweep is repeated every ninety seconds.'

'Ninety seconds?' said Paulo. 'But that is not enough time. We cannot get across the open ground, cut the wire and get into the building in less than ninety seconds. We will be seen. We will be caught . . .'

Paulo trailed to a halt and shared a hopeless look with Li. Alex scowled at the ground and Hex shook his head. Amber watched their reactions and her worst fears were confirmed.

'Hey, come on,' she said. 'We can't give up. A-Watch would've given up, but we're Alpha Force now. We won't give up. Right, guys?'

The others all understood what Amber meant. There was a huge difference between A-Watch and Alpha Force. Six months earlier they had all met for the first time aboard a sail-training ship called the
Phoenix.
The ship was on her maiden voyage, sailing across the Java Sea with a crew of young people from all over the world. The five of them had been put together in A-Watch and had quickly gained the reputation of being the worst watch team in the whole crew. Amber, a black American girl from a family of software billionaires, and Hex, a street-wise Londoner and expert hacker, had taken an instant dislike to one another. Paulo, a handsome Argentinian boy, and Li, a lively Anglo-Chinese girl, had spent their time flirting instead of working. Alex, the fifth member of the team, had withdrawn from the whole messy business, getting on with his work in isolated silence and wishing he was back home in Northumberland.

It had seemed impossible that A-Watch would ever pull together, but when they became castaways on an uninhabited tropical island, they had been forced to start working as a team. In one terrifying week they had survived shark attacks, killer komodo dragons and a group of vicious, modern-day pirates. When Hex had developed blood-poisoning as the result of a deadly komodo bite, Amber had swum through shark-infested waters to reach the medicines that would save him. Now, although they were complete opposites, Amber and Hex were the closest of friends. They all were.

During that life-changing week they had learned a great deal about working together as a team - and Amber had also discovered that the death of her parents in a plane crash a year earlier had not been an accident. The plane had been deliberately sabotaged. At first Amber could not understand why anyone would want to do such a thing, but then she had learned that her parents were much more than they seemed. They had been secretly involved in dangerous undercover work, using some of their vast fortune to help other people. As private individuals, they could go into places where governments and officials were denied access. They could get food and medicines in or smuggle video evidence out. Much of their covert filming had ended up on the international news, forcing governments and authorities into action. The more Amber discovered, the more she understood why her parents had been killed.

Amber had persuaded her uncle to let the five of them carry on the work of her parents and Hex had come up with a name for the team: Alpha Force. 'Alpha' was made up of the initial letters of all their names. It was also the beginning of the Greek alphabet. That was what Alpha Force was supposed to be - a new beginning, coming out of the sacrifice Amber's parents had made.

'Guys?' repeated Amber now, with a touch of desperation in her voice. 'We won't give up on our first real challenge, will we?'

'No way,' said Li. 'We've worked too hard for this.'

They all nodded in agreement as they thought about the past six months. They had spent every school break together, undergoing hard physical and mental training to prepare them for the work ahead. During the school terms, when they went their separate ways, they had each devoted every spare minute to improving their individual talents. Li had worked hard on her martial arts and free climbing. Alex had spent days and nights out on the Northumbrian moors, sharpening his survival skills. Hex was already an expert hacker and code-breaker, but he had made it his business to learn as much as he could about surveillance and security equipment. To the surprise of teachers at her exclusive boarding school in Boston, Amber had become their most dedicated foreign languages student, spending hours every evening in the language lab. She had also forced herself to go sailing in the little family yacht, which had not left the marina since her parents died, so that she could practise her map-reading and navigation. Back home in Argentina, Paulo had taken out motorbikes, quads and four-wheel-drive vehicles, churning up the dirt tracks that crisscrossed his family cattle ranch until he had perfected his off-road driving skills. He had also put together his own compact tool-kit and carried it with him everywhere in a leather pouch attached to his belt.

'Come on,' said Alex, gazing out at the dark Nevada desert. 'We've got this far. We can't give up now. Let's get thinking. It's going to take us at least four minutes to cover that stretch of open ground, cut through the compound fence and get into the building. Four minutes. But the searchlight sweep comes round every ninety seconds. Any ideas?'

The silence dragged on as everybody racked their brains. As the hope slowly drained out of her, Amber felt the cold of the desert seeping into her bones. She reached for one of the desert camouflage sheets they had sheltered under as they waited for darkness and, with a shaky sigh, wrapped it around her shoulders. Hex watched her absently, then his eyes lit up with excitement.

'That's it!' he whispered. 'I've got it!'

Amber grinned and stood up straighter. 'Knew you'd solve it, puzzle boy,' she crowed. 'What's the plan?'

T
HREE

As soon as the guard and his dog disappeared round the far corner of complex, five dark shapes left the cover of the sandstone mesa and ran across the open ground with their heads low, dodging sage brush and yucca plants and leaping over small boulders. They were heading for the compound fence, racing the searchlight beam. Li had tucked all her long, silky hair away under a woollen hat and even dark-skinned Amber was wearing camouflage cream to block any shine from her nose and cheekbones, so only the whites of their eyes reflected the wedge of light as it swept towards them.

They raced on towards the fence, but the searchlight was faster. It flowed across the rough ground towards them with an easy speed. Alex judged the distance to the fence and realized that they were not going to make it. In five seconds they would be floodlit. Four seconds. Three . . .

Alex gave the signal and they all flung themselves to the ground, shaking out the rolled-up camouflage sheets they held in their hands as they went down. When the searchlight beam rolled over them two seconds later, it found nothing but five shallow mounds of desert ground. They waited under the camouflage sheets, keeping their eyes closed against the searchlight beam to preserve their night vision.

As soon as the beam left them, they were up again, bundling up the camouflage sheets as they ran. Seconds later, they reached the fence. Alex knelt and got to work with a powerful pair of bolt-cutters, which snipped through the steel mesh of the fence as though it was tinfoil. He nodded to Paulo and they hooked their fingers through the mesh on each side of the breach. Slowly they bent back the two sections until there was a gap big enough to squeeze through.

One by one, they went down on their bellies and squirmed under the fence. Alex was the last and, as he began to ease through, the searchlight beam was approaching again, sweeping across the compound from the other direction. Amber looked at the searchlight, then down at her stopwatch.

'Fifteen seconds,' she whispered.

Alex wriggled his broad shoulders through the gap, then jerked to a halt halfway under the fence.

'Come on!' hissed Li.

'Can't,' grunted Alex. 'Stuck.'

Li flung herself to the ground next to Alex as the other three ran for cover. They were aiming for a door which was set in the end wall of a long, narrow building. The end wall faced away from the searchlight tower, which meant that there was a small area in front of the door where the searchlight could not penetrate. They reached the door and flattened themselves against the wall on either side of it.

'Ten seconds,' squeaked Amber.

At the fence Li felt along the back of Alex's belt until she found the hook of steel that had snagged him. She grabbed the steel with fingers that had been strengthened by years of free climbing and bent the hook back on itself. As soon as he was free, Alex surged under the gap.

'Go!' he hissed to Li.

She ran to join the others while he stooped and grabbed the fence on each side of the gap. His whole body trembled as he strained to pull the two curls of steel mesh back into line. Slowly they came together as the searchlight raced towards him.

'Now, Alex!' hissed Amber from the shadows.

Alex gave the fence a last, quick survey. The breach was hardly visible, even in the growing light of the approaching searchlight. With luck, the guard would walk right past it.

'Alex!'

Alex let go of the fence and flung himself towards the others, but he was too late. The searchlight reached him and lit him up as though he was on a stage. With one desperate leap, Alex launched himself out of the brilliant pool of light and rolled into the shadow of the doorway. For a few seconds they all froze in place, listening. Alex had only been in the full glare of the beam for a split second, but had he been spotted?

No cries of alarm broke the silence of the desert and the searchlight beam continued steadily on its way. 'I think we got away with it,' whispered Alex after a few seconds.

'Yeah, but the dog patrol is going to come round that corner again and walk right into us in . . .' Amber glanced at her stopwatch. 'In less than two minutes.'

The door had no lock. Instead there was a keypad above the handle. The cover of the keypad was held in place with four tiny screws. Paulo reached into the leather pouch at his belt and pulled out an equally small screwdriver. He applied it to the keypad and pressed a button on the handle. The screwdriver let out a thin whine and, in two seconds, the screw fell into his hand. Hex reached into a rucksack he had brought with him and took out a small black box with two wires coming off it. As soon as Paulo eased the cover away from the keypad, Hex went to work, clipping the wires to the innards of the keypad. The digital display on the box flickered as it went through all the possible combinations and selected the correct sequence of numbers. The door unlocked with a click and swung outwards on silent hinges. Paulo busied himself with replacing the cover on the keypad as Hex stared into the dark corridor beyond the doorway.

'Let's go!' hissed Amber impatiently, staring at her stopwatch.

'Wait.' Hex took a small torch from the rucksack and shone it into the corridor. It seemed to be clear, but Hex was suspicious by nature. He moved the beam around the doorframe, then down to the floor. There was a doormat just inside the doorway. Hex frowned. Why would a doormat be necessary in a place where it hardly ever rained? Carefully, he eased up the corner of the mat and shone the torch underneath. Pressure pads. If anyone stood on the mat, the pads would activate an alarm system.

Hex made sure the others had seen the pressure pads, then he eased the mat down again. He reached into his rucksack and took out an aerosol can. It contained pressurized spring water, and was normally used as a way of keeping cool in the dry heat of the desert day. That was not why Hex was using it.

As the fine mist of water spread into the corridor, a thin, red, knee-high beam came into view in the torchlight. It angled from one side of the corridor to the other, just beyond the doormat. 'See that?' he whispered. 'That's an infra-red laser beam. If we break that beam, it'll set off an alarm.'

'We have to get inside!' hissed Amber. 'There's less than a minute left!'

'OK,' said Hex. 'Follow me, one at a time. Go round the mat, then step over the beam. Once you're on the other side of the beam, don't move an inch. There are probably more of them.'

One by one they eased around the mat, then stepped over the beam. Amber was getting frantic. The time was up, according to her stopwatch. She stepped over the beam and squeezed in beside Hex, Li and Paulo.

'Now you, Alex,' she whispered. But Alex did not follow her over the beam. Instead, he stopped in the doorway and pulled a small, limp, furry body from inside his shirt. It was a dead kangaroo rat. He had found it under some sage brush earlier in the day as they hiked across the desert from the helicopter. The little body had stayed warm inside his shirt and it was beginning to smell a bit.

Alex bent and laid the kangaroo rat on the ground just outside the door. As he straightened, he heard the snuffling pant of the German Shepherd getting louder as it trotted the last few metres towards the corner. In a few seconds the dog would turn the corner and see him. Quickly, Alex stepped into the corridor and stood balancing on the narrow strip of floor at the edge of the mat. He reached behind him and pulled the door shut. The lock clicked into place just as the guard dog rounded the corner. Hex turned off his torch and they stood in the dark corridor, listening intently.

Outside, the dog picked up their scent immediately, as Alex had guessed it would. With a yelping bark, the dog turned and headed for the door, dragging the guard after it. The dog slammed into the door with frantic force. Alex jumped at the noise and began to overbalance onto the doormat. For a few seconds he hung over the pressure pads, windmilling his arms. Finally he found his balance again and slumped back against the wall with a relieved sigh.

Outside, the dog was still barking and scrabbling at the door. Suddenly the door handle rattled loudly as the guard tried it. 'What is it, boy?' he said. His voice was so loud, it was as though he was standing in the corridor next to them. 'Hang on a minute. It's only a dead kangaroo rat. Come on, you stupid mutt. Leave it. It's time for my coffee break.'

The dog's frantic barks grew fainter as the guard dragged it away from the door. Inside the corridor, Hex flicked on the torch again. He trained it on a control panel at the other end of the corridor. 'That'll turn off the beams,' he said, turning to Li. 'Think you can make it?'

Li took the aerosol can and sprayed a fine mist ahead of her. The mist revealed a complex cat's cradle of red beams running the length of the short corridor. Paulo groaned when he saw them but Li gave him a cheeky, sideways grin.

'Easy-peasy,' she whispered and Paulo smiled back at her proudly.

Li took a deep breath and set off. She was wearing a skin-tight Lycra bodysuit and her hair was tucked up into a hat to keep it out of the way of the beams. Slowly, Li made her way along the corridor, turning, balancing and bending into near-impossible shapes. At last there were only two beams to go, but they were angled in such a way that it was impossible to step over them. Li stood poised for a moment, judging angles and distances, then she raised her arms above her head and went up onto her toes. She soared into the air and jack-knifed over the first beam. Landing on her hands, she pushed off again, flipped neatly over the second beam and made a perfect landing right in front of the control panel.

With a flourish, Li turned off the laser beams. The others ran to join her as she swung open the door at the end of the corridor. Hex flicked his torch around the dark room on the other side of the door until the beam lit up a high-powered computer. His fingers were already keying the air as he settled into the chair in front of the keyboard. Now it was his turn.

Like all hackers, Hex hated the simple point-and-click operating system most civilians relied on. He did not need a user-friendly mouse to lead him around by the nose. Instead he went in the hacker's way, pounding direct commands out on the keyboard and communicating with the computer in its own language. Within a minute he was into the system and scanning the list of files. He found the file he wanted and tried to open it. The file was password-protected.

Hex backtracked, returning to the list of files and scanning the names. There it was - a file labelled
PASSWORDS
. Hex grinned and shook his head at the stupidity of most computer-users as he opened the file, retrieved the necessary password and returned to the original file. He opened the file and sat back, smiling. Then the smile slipped from his face as an unreadable mish-mash of characters appeared on the screen.

'Damn,' muttered Hex, frowning at the monitor.

'Problems?' asked Alex.

'It's encrypted.'

'Can you do anything?' asked Li.

'There are a couple of options,' said Hex.

'Well, you'd better get on with it, code-boy,' hissed Amber, looking up from her stopwatch. 'That guard and his dog are due back any minute now.'

Hex frowned at the screen, considering what to do next. The owners of this computer had not scored very highly in the intelligence stakes so far, so he decided to go for the most obvious solution. Sometimes simply copying an encrypted file would be enough to decipher it, because the computer always copied a file in plaintext form, unless it had been told not to. Hex was guessing that this computer had been given no such instruction. His fingers hammered at the keys again as he gave the computer the copy command. Instantly, the mishmash of characters transformed themselves into a readable sentence.

WELCOME
,
USER
.
TO START THE PROGRAM
,
PRESS ANY KEY
.

Hex smiled at the others before leaning forward and hitting the space bar. Another sentence appeared on the screen:

COUNTDOWN SEQUENCE INITIATED
-
YOU NOW HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO EVACUATE THE BUILDING
.

'What?' Hex jumped to his feet. 'What countdown sequence?' he demanded.

A pleasant female voice emerged from the speakers next to the computer. 'Nineteen . . . eighteen . . .' said the voice mildly, as though it was reading out the weather forecast.

'Whatever it is, we're not staying to find out,' yelled Amber. 'Run!'