Revenge (19 page)

But the bullets never reached him.

The helicopter plunged down, hovering centimetres from the ground, right between Jimmy and the gunmen. The bullets tore into the side of the chopper.

There were only two people inside. Two masked men – a pilot and a passenger. They both picked up machine guns and now it was their turn to shoot at Jimmy. Nobody could get in the way this time.

Jimmy raised his hands, but too late. His chest reverberated with the repeated pounding and blood spurted into the sunlight. Jimmy’s eyes widened. He staggered backwards, leaning on the gauze fence. Then he toppled over it. The last thing he saw as he fell into the East River was a huge advertising hoarding overlooking the water from Queens. It was decades old, and the arched red letters were accentuated by the sun streaming through them from behind. At last, thought Jimmy. The prophecy of his final image had been fulfilled. He’d seen SILVERCUP.

Georgie and Felix jumped out of the back of the truck before it had even come to a complete stop. They waved their thanks to the driver as he sped off again and brushed the cabbage from their clothes.

“Come on, let’s go!” Georgie insisted, sprinting away.

“Wait, I think I’ve got cabbage in my shoe.” Felix half-ran, half-hopped after her.

“OK, great, so we’ll be killed by the British Secret Service,” Georgie mumbled, “but at least your shoes will be free of pak choi.”

Felix put in a burst of speed and caught up.

“I’m sorry,” Georgie said, her tone changing. “I didn’t mean your mum and dad would…”

“It’s OK.” Felix shrugged and tried not to look sad. “I know.”

There wasn’t time for being miserable – that could wait. The last thing Felix wanted to think about was the look on his mother’s face as his parents had been dragged away.

“How did they find us?” he asked, sneaking a look over his shoulder.

Georgie didn’t answer straight away. She and Felix exchanged a glance, both thinking the same thing. If the CIA had been protecting them, how had NJ7 found the safehouse?

They ran on like they never had before, not only because there could be agents chasing them, but because they feared for Jimmy. What was he trying to do at Roosevelt Island and why hadn’t he told them? Now finding him was their only chance of finding safety – neither one trusted the CIA any more than they trusted NJ7.

They reached the corner of the block and Georgie grabbed the map from Felix.

“Give me that,” she ordered. “I know what you’re like with maps.”

“Hey,” Felix protested. “I can find anything on a map. I just can’t find things in real life.”

“This way.” Georgie stuffed the map into her pocket and set off again, not waiting for either of them to catch their breath. It wasn’t long before they reached the edge of Manhattan.

“There it is,” Georgie announced, bending double and pressing a hand on the stitch in her side.

Felix shielded his eyes from the sun as it rose over the river. The island was only a short distance away across the water. He peered towards it.

“Hey!” he gasped. “There’s Jimmy!”

Georgie followed where he was pointing. Together they saw a fleet of military speedboats close in on the island. They watched in silence as Jimmy emerged from the ruin. To them he was a tiny figure, silhouetted against the rising sun, but they gaped at his speed.

His speed wasn’t enough.

“NO!” Georgie screamed. “JIMMY!”

Felix couldn’t even speak.

They saw the helicopter swoop down and cut off the sniper fire. Then they watched, helpless, as the masked men in the helicopter opened fire and Jimmy’s chest spattered a shower of red into the air. Georgie’s face was white. Her hands clamped over her mouth. This time, her scream came out as nothing but a desperate wheeze of air. As her brother hit the water, she broke down. Her sobs wrenched her whole body and she collapsed on the pavement.

“Didn’t you see…?” she panted. Felix was as still as a lamp-post. “Why aren’t you…?”

“Wait, no,” Felix protested. “It’s not…” He couldn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he held up Jimmy’s notebook, open to the last page. On it, in bold red capitals, was written:

DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SEE. REMEMBER THE STICK INSECTS.

“Remember?” Felix asked, his eyes lit up with excitement. “Some of the stick insects looked dead, but they weren’t.”
“What?” Georgie sobbed, trying hard to control herself until she knew exactly what Felix was talking about.

“That’s what he’s telling us. He probably didn’t think we’d see it in real life. He probably meant for us to see this on TV or something, but if everybody thinks he’s dead, NJ7 will stop chasing him. And, wait…” He looked out again at the island. “I don’t know how they did it, but I think I know who was in the helicopter. I think Jimmy planned this.” He turned back to Georgie and hauled her on to her feet. “I think he’s going to be OK.”

Georgie looked at him, then over to the island. She replayed in her head the horrific scene she’d witnessed. She couldn’t stop herself wincing, then she read Jimmy’s message again. Her tears stopped. She wiped her face and blinked hard. At last, a tiny smile made her lips quiver. Then she said, “Look’s like my brother’s not such an idiot.”

“Smartest guy I know,” Felix agreed. “But now we have to look after ourselves.”

Georgie nodded. “What do we do?” she asked. “Go to the CIA?”

“Do you trust them?”

They looked at each other for a long time, neither one knowing what to say. Then they held each other’s shoulders to gather their strength. Each of them took a huge deep breath and ran.

* * *

Jimmy pulled himself up on to the rocks that ran alongside the promenade at the other end of Roosevelt Island. He flopped on to the walkway with a desperate lurch. Black water gushed out of his lungs and his body convulsed, thrusting a massive gulp of air down in place of the liquid. Before he could move, a strong hand clamped on to his shoulder.

“Good job, Jimmy,” came a deep, American voice. “Don’t worry. You’re with the CIA now.”

Jimmy wanted to say “thanks” but he didn’t have his breath back yet. The current in the East River had been stronger than he’d expected. Instead, he rolled over on to his back and reached into his shirt. One by one, he pulled off the burst sachets of ketchup that he’d stuck all over his chest. He laughed when he noticed that he’d accidentally used one mayonnaise sachet as well. He gathered the wrappers together and handed them to the CIA agent, who dropped them into a litter bin. He was a big broad man, but in casual clothes, not military uniform.

“We’d better move,” he announced.

Jimmy stood up and ran unevenly to a long black car that was waiting with the door to the back seat open. All his energy dropped away when he slumped into the seat. There was a towel waiting for him and he buried his head in it. He didn’t know what to feel. The
emptiness hadn’t gone away yet. His friends and his family would watch him being killed on the next TV news bulletin. But his enemies had already seen it, and that was what counted.

The CIA man followed him to the car, but paused to pick up a ragged scrap of white paper that had fallen out of Jimmy’s back pocket.

The helicopter tipped from side to side, buffeted by the wind. The pilot’s crash course in how to fly wasn’t much good now because his hands were on a machine gun instead of the controls. Even after Jimmy tumbled backwards into the water, the two men in the chopper kept firing for several seconds. Then at last, the peal of their bullets died away, and only their joint war-cry rang out:

“REVENGE!”

Before the word was even completely out of their mouths, the team of NJ7 agents stormed the aircraft. The two men were bundled out of the cockpit and found themselves with their faces pressed into the Roosevelt Island mud. Each one had an NJ7 knee in his back. Eventually the helicopter was brought safely to rest.

“SECURE!” yelled one of the agents. That was the signal for their commanding officer to step off one of the speedboats and approach the scene.

“Take off their balaclavas,” Miss Bennett ordered. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”

She stayed a safe distance away, and tried to maintain her composure, but when she saw the faces of the gunmen, she bristled and pulled her long black coat tighter around her.

“Quinn and Rick Doren,” she announced. “Playing with toys for bigger boys than you, no?”

“He killed our sister,” Quinn said bitterly, spitting mud out of his mouth. “If we’d let you kill him, we would never have had our revenge.”

Miss Bennett thought hard, examining the two young men on the ground in front of her. She nodded to the surrounding agents to let them up. Then, from Miss Bennett’s boat, came a teenage girl, wrapped in a thick black coat.

“Quinn! Rick!”

She was already crying, clearly distraught at the events she had watched unfold in front of her.

“Eva!” shouted the two men, running to embrace their sister. They suffocated her in a muddy embrace. All three wept. For a few seconds they were huddled together.

“You killed Jimmy!” Eva sobbed quietly. The boys didn’t reply, but Rick slipped a small piece of card into her coat pocket.

“What are you…?”

Eva discreetly pulled it out, using her two brothers as a shield so that nobody else saw. In her woolly gloves
she grasped what looked like the torn-off corner of a small cardboard box. On it was a lot of technical information she didn’t understand, but one word stood out: LASER-BLANKS.

“Blanks?” she gasped. Quinn quickly pulled her towards him and smothered her before she could say anything else.

“I’m so glad you’re OK,” he whispered. “I’m so glad
everyone’s
OK.”

He held on to his sister for several seconds more. He could feel that, wrapped in his arms, she was squealing with delight and laughing.

Meanwhile, Rick confronted Miss Bennett. “You told us she was dead!” he bellowed.

“Oh, look,” Miss Bennett said blankly. “We found her. Hooray.”

“But we only killed Jimmy because we thought he’d killed our sister.”

“I know.” Miss Bennett was eyeing Rick and Quinn suspiciously, sizing them up. “Such an unfortunate turn of events. But at least the outcome is happy. In the end you’ve done your country a great service. Even if you thought you were doing it for personal reasons.”

Rick and Quinn stood on either side of Eva now, waiting for Miss Bennett’s judgement.

“Well, look at you,” the woman cooed, deep in thought. “A family affair.” Then she added, “Eva is doing very well in my office, you know.” She looked
from Quinn, to Eva, to Rick, and back again. “You’ll need training, but if you can all keep a secret from your parents, how about adding two more Doren recruits to NJ7?”

All three broke into huge smiles – though for very different reasons than Miss Bennett believed. Quinn and Rick shook her hand, then Eva escorted them back to the boat.

Meanwhile, Miss Bennett had a clean-up operation to run.

“Get me divers!” she screamed. “Bring me charts of the currents. Show me the exact spot where his body is going to be washed up. I want divers trawling every miserable litre of this river. Bring me the body!”

“Miss Bennett, this isn’t London!” Paduk yelled back, marching up to her. “We don’t have jurisdiction here. We’re lucky we haven’t all been arrested already.”

Miss Bennett scrunched her fists in her hair. “I need confirmation,” she insisted.

“Confirmation?” Paduk whispered, so that none of the other soldiers could hear. “What more confirmation do you need? Didn’t you see that little boy’s body being torn apart by machine-gun fire?”

“Are you implying something, Paduk?”

“It’s not right,” Paduk hissed. “What we’ve done here today. It’s not right.”

“You were protecting Britain,” Miss Bennett barked back.

Paduk marched off, not daring to contradict his superior officer, but he muttered under his breath, “I’m beginning to wonder whether Britain is still worth protecting.”

Miss Bennett drew in a deep sigh. Her brow was furrowed in thought. She never imagined quite these sorts of tribulations facing her when she took on the role of running Britain’s most powerful and secret intelligence agency.

She walked right to the edge of the island, to the very spot where Jimmy had fallen. She looked out across the river, narrowing her eyes against the wind. It made them water a little and blew her hair into a flame behind her head. There were so many shadows shifting beneath the surf. She wanted to examine each of them in turn, but as soon as she looked at one, it was gone again. The waves lapped around the island while behind her, Paduk commanded the NJ7 unit.

It was several minutes before Miss Bennett turned away from the water, away from the wind, and walked back towards the ruin. Her eyes were still watering.

Union Square bustled with traffic and people. In the centre of the square, near where everybody was rushing in and out of the subway, there was a small collection of stalls. Some were selling home-made products like cheese, bread and jams; others stocked trinkets and carriage clocks. This was Union Square Market and plenty of people slowed down to browse what the stallholders had to offer.

One of those people was Colonel Keays. He looked strangely uncomfortable in jeans and a faded leather jacket. No more than two metres behind him, at all times, was one of his agents, also dressed so that he blended into the crowd.

In fact, all around the square, on every corner and on the roof of every surrounding building, there were more CIA agents in constant communication with each other. No member of the public would have noticed them, even as they moved among them. What’s more,
that morning the square was packed with NJ7 agents too. Each of them also looked like a perfectly normal member of the public – shopping, dashing back to work or meeting friends for a coffee.

Miss Bennett spotted Colonel Keays straight away and marched right up to the stall where he was browsing for second-hand watches.

“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Keays,” she snapped, quietly.

“And so have you, Miss Bennett.”

Neither of them looked directly at each other. Anybody observing from a distance would have had no idea that they were even in conversation.

“Well, you’re starting,” Miss Bennett ordered. “What were Quinn and Rick Doren doing in a US military helicopter, with American army machine-guns?”

The two of them moved along the stalls together, worming through the crowds.

“How do I know?” Keays sighed. “This army seems to leak hardware all over the world. They could have bought the stuff off eBay. There’ll be an enquiry, but it won’t find anything.”

“Don’t give me that—” Miss Bennett started, but the Colonel cut her off sharply.

“And don’t you forget your place. I won’t have the head of the secret police of some insignificant dictatorship thinking she can treat me the way she treats her prisoners. Keep that in mind when you speak
to me, Miss Bennett, and we’ll continue to get along fine.” He glanced up for an instant and shot Miss Bennett a huge grin. It quickly vanished.

“I went to a lot of trouble for your ‘Reflex Plan’,” the man continued. “I arranged for you to transmit covert signals over the United States cellphone mast network on the understanding that it was a joint operation.”

“It was,” Miss Bennett insisted. “We wanted the President dead and I thought you did too.”

They both looked around, uneasy, and walked along to another stall.

“Of course I do,” Keays whispered.

“So what went wrong?”

“What went wrong? I’ll tell you what went wrong. You did.” Keays was having trouble keeping his voice down. “My side of the operation went perfectly:
I
showed Jimmy the schematics of the building.
I
gave him his security pass.
I
diverted three whole police divisions so that only my handpicked team was on site. The President had no protection.
I
cleared security from the rooftops so the assassin could get away. It was perfect. Except that the assassin forgot to do any assassinating. Where was the NJ7 back-up?”

“The French had an agent in place to take out the Prime Minister,” Miss Bennett explained. “We couldn’t have foreseen that. The PM’s life was our priority.”

“And yet this mysterious French agent has completely disappeared. Then, to top it all, I find out
that you started transmitting a new signal – still using
our
masts, of course – and kept it secret from me. What were you thinking?”

“It worked, didn’t it? Jimmy Coates is dead.”

“Some of us didn’t want Jimmy Coates dead,” Keays snarled.

“Oh, really? And what did you plan to do with him if he had survived? Use him to get you into the White House?”

Keays pulled himself up to his full height and for the first time they stared at each other.

“If Jimmy were alive,” the Colonel rasped, “that’s exactly what I would do.” There was a sharp glint in his eye. Against his will, his face threatened to crack into a smile, so he turned his back on Miss Bennett, pretending to inspect the cheeses on the stall next to him.

“Alphonsus Grogan is a money-obsessed chump,” he muttered. “He thinks this place is his private company, not a great nation. He only takes advice from the heads of big business, and most of them are his uncles, aunts or cousins. His only principle is ‘How much money can I make today?’ He’s selling America to the highest bidder.” Keays looked over his shoulder to make sure even his own agent couldn’t hear him. Miss Bennett leaned in closer so her ear was right next to the man’s face. The smell of the cheeses was overpowering, but so were the Colonel’s words:

“I won’t sit back and watch the USA being run like a market stall. Grogan needs to go. Then I can declare a state of emergency and step in to run this country efficiently.”

Miss Bennett nodded sagely. “I look forward to seeing the end of old-fashioned democracy in the United States,” she announced with a soft smile.

“Ha! Old fashioned democracy died a long time ago – if it ever really existed. People here might be allowed to vote every now and again, but that’s just because we know they like to feel free. Really, a vote means nothing unless you’re rich. In America, only those with money have any power.”

“And in Britain, only those with power have any money. I suppose that’s the difference between us.” Miss Bennett smiled, then asked, “Can we count on your support if Britain and France…”

“Until I’m in the White House, that’s up to Grogan. And he will act according to his business interests. That could either mean backing France to punish Britain for not trading in US goods, or it could mean backing Britain so he can blackmail you into putting a Starbucks on every corner again.” He hesitated and finally added, “Good luck, Miss Bennett.”

They made eye contact and nodded to each other discreetly, before Miss Bennett strolled away, blending into the Union Square crowd.

Colonel Keays’ assistant chose that moment to step forward and hand him a palmtop. Keays stared at the
screen. His future was a green dot travelling fast along a map of New York, heading for a secret military airbase just outside Piscataway, New Jersey. At that he chuckled, then slipped the gadget into his pocket.

Jimmy knew he was surely being tracked. But in these circumstances, it was reassuring. He was with a powerful organisation now and he knew they were only tracking him to protect him. The car was speeding out of the city. The driver had told him a private plane was waiting to whisk him into the clouds and several thousand miles away.

It was such a relief to have his head clear of those visions. They’d invaded every thought and now, at last, they were gone. But in their place was a heavy anxiety. He still didn’t know what had happened to his mother. And until he received word from Colonel Keays, he couldn’t be sure that the others were in protection with their new identities.

Nevertheless, Jimmy’s future looked a lot brighter now than it had for a long time. Even though he had no idea where he was going, or who he was going to see when he got there, he had a chance at living a life. His only battle now would be with time and the progress of the powers inside him.

He couldn’t help wondering whether he’d made the right decision. Thinking about it made his insides feel
heavy. He didn’t want to feel sad because he was sure that this was the best outcome – NJ7 wouldn’t be looking for any of them any more. But how could he be happy, when he didn’t know if he would see his mother, his sister or his friends again?

He sniffed, pretending the cold from the river had made his nose run, so the driver wouldn’t notice he was holding back tears. He covered his eyes with his hand. What would it take for him to go back to a normal life, with Georgie, his mother and Felix? There was only one way that was going to happen: if the Neo-democratic British Government fell and NJ7 became a force for good.

Jimmy laughed at the idea. But then, after a minute or two, he started thinking about it more seriously.
It could happen
, he told himself. And if he really wanted to take revenge on his ex-father, maybe the way to do it would be to turn Britain back into a true democracy, with Ian Coates as just another citizen.

Jimmy stared out of the window, watching the unfamiliar landscape rush past – vast industrial estates with occasional spring flowers pushing through the concrete. Bubbling inside him he could feel a new strength. It wasn’t his programming, and it wasn’t some vision that had been forced on to him by a phone network. It was determination. He gritted his teeth, picturing himself with Georgie and Felix in the Prime
Minister’s office putting together a new government. It was so ridiculous it made him laugh again – but there was something in the back of his mind that didn’t find it so funny.

Suddenly, his thoughts were interrupted.

“Oh, by the way, Jimmy,” the driver called out, “this fell out of your pocket.”

With a look of intense concentration, the man had one hand on the wheel while the other hand was picking apart the sodden leaves of a white paper napkin.

“No!” Jimmy cried. “Don’t read that!”

It was too late. The agent was already rotating the paper this way and that, trying to make out what it said. He glanced round when he heard Jimmy’s protest, then turned back to watch the road.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Jimmy,” he said with a smile. “But it’s OK…” He held up the napkin to show Jimmy, who shrank away, not wanting to see. “I think the water made the ink run, or something.”

He threw the paper on to the front passenger seat, but carried on examining it as he drove. The faint red smudge puzzled him.
Does that say what I think it does?
he thought.
Didn’t he used to be Prime Minister of
England?
He shrugged, then muttered, “It’s almost illegible, anyway.”

Jimmy dropped his head back and breathed a massive sigh of relief.

“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered with a confident smile.
It really doesn’t
, he thought to himself.
Whoever’s name is there, I’m not going to be him. I’m
going to be me
.