Revenge (7 page)

Mitchell pulled his coat tight around him. Spring must have been late in Paris this year. Surrounding him were tower blocks that seemed to lean out over the pavement. They turned the streets into concrete tunnels that channelled the wind so it blew the litter around his ankles and the dust into his face. This wasn’t the picturesque, historic Paris that so many millions of people love. This was Fontenay-aux-Roses, a filthy and forgotten
banlieue
on the edge of town. It was also Mitchell’s rendezvous.

He crossed into a park and headed towards a garish funfair. It was a flashing, blaring mess, spewing out a cloud of fast-food wrappers and stray helium balloons. In ten minutes, he was to be at the candyfloss machine to receive information on his target. NJ7 contacts had been investigating at the DGSE offices nearby.

Mitchell sneaked through the temporary fencing and pretended to smile at the kids who were doing the
same. Then he discreetly checked his watch. Early. He walked slowly around the edge of the fair and ended up in the queue for one of the rides. He was killing time.

All around him was the unnecessary noise and fake excitement of a modern funfair. There was no charm to the place and the promised thrills of the rides meant nothing to Mitchell now. He watched some older kids hiding round the back of the burger vans.
That’s where
I’d be
, he thought, imagining how things would have been different if he’d been born in Paris. Then he realised there was no luck involved in where he had been born. He had been designed and created. All of his existence had been set out for him. But it still felt right. It still thrilled him to be doing his job – and to be doing it well.

Mitchell saw one of the kids throw an empty can at an unsuspecting passer-by. The others let out a chorus of laughter and, for some reason that he couldn’t explain, Mitchell wanted to laugh too. But it felt as if the laugh itself was weighed down by a block of granite in his chest. Mitchell couldn’t remember the last time he had just hung out like that. He could hardly even remember the boys who used to be his mates.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by a nudge from behind. He spun round to see a boy who must have been only about five. The child’s face was nothing but congealed ice-cream and a disgusted frown. Mitchell realised he had reached the front of the queue. He
glanced at his watch again. It wasn’t time yet. In any case, he didn’t want to arouse attention by deciding not to get on the ride after all.

It was a giant waltzer – eight huge teacups, each on the end of a metal tentacle. Mitchell carefully stepped into his compartment and pulled the restraint over his shoulders. There were three seats in each cup so the five year-old stomped in as well, staring at him, still not smiling. The third seat was left empty.

“Where’s your mum?” Mitchell grumbled. The child stared. A dribble of snot crept down his upper lip, mingling with the ice-cream. Mitchell grimaced and looked away.

Slowly, the machinery chuntered into action. In the centre, where the spokes met, there was a cramped booth. In it, a scruffy young man leaned on a set of levers. But he wasn’t paying attention to the ride. He was looking out for any girls walking past.

The giant cups lifted high into the air. Four of them, including Mitchell’s, kept rising once the others had stopped. He looked out across the fairground, trying to ignore the breeze that chilled his neck. Then the machinery gave a heavy KERCHUNK and the tentacles starting going round. The four higher ones went in the opposite direction to the cups beneath. Then all of them started spinning.

It was slow at first, but Mitchell’s view of the fairground quickly became a blurred smear of colour. The kid next to
him started screaming his head off. The wind blasted into Mitchell’s face. Then French pop music started blaring out from a set of huge speakers. It all blended with the drone of the machinery to make a truly hideous sound.

The only thing Mitchell could see properly were the people in the three other compartments that were whirring round at the same rate. It was then that he noticed the girl.

His first sight of her sent a shudder across his skin and something forced him to look for her again. His cup spun on its own axis, faster and faster. Every time Mitchell was facing the right way, there she was: staring at him from the teacup opposite.

She looked like she was about twelve. Her hair was a sleek auburn and she had wide blue eyes. She wasn’t blinking. Despite being hurled round in a never-ending circle, this girl had an air of stillness, as if she had slowed down time.

There was a smile on her face, but not the wild enjoyment of the kids around her. They were getting their kicks from the ride. This girl was happy about something else – and Mitchell got the feeling it was something nasty. He couldn’t help staring back, craning his neck to see her every time the ride spun him round the wrong way.

Then he heard it. At first, he thought it was the wind, the music, the machinery or the screams of the child next to him.

It flew into his ears as a whisper: “Mitchell.”

He looked for the girl. She was still staring at him. It sent blades into Mitchell’s chest. His programming whirred round his belly. This girl was bad news. At last he saw her move.

She took in a deep breath and yelled at him over the din of the ride: “I know about you, Mitchell.” Her voice was high, piercing the racket. She had a very faint French accent. “I know what you’re looking for. I’ve seen your agents investigating at the DGSE.”

She grinned at him. Her teeth glinted in the neon light. In his shock, Mitchell tried to stand up before he realised that the safety restraint was locked in place. Mitchell pumped that extra strength into his arms and there was a click as the hinges snapped.

Mitchell’s head was spinning as fast as the teacup he was sitting in. He looked around, frantic. Surely everybody in the fairground could hear the secrets this girl was shrieking at the top of her voice. But nobody else seemed interested. If they could hear at all, they probably didn’t speak English.

“Who are you?” Mitchell shouted.

Slowly, he raised the restraint off his shoulders. The boy next to him stopped screaming and tried to raise his restraint as well. When he couldn’t, he took up screaming again, with even more vigour.

Mitchell twisted, trying to keep his eyes on the girl, but now her seat was empty. He scanned the other
compartments. She wasn’t there. He looked down at the four other teacups, spinning in the opposite direction. They were rising now.

After a second, Mitchell’s compartment jolted to a halt and immediately started hurling round the circle the other way. He was thrown off his feet and smacked his chin against the floor. The metal scraped off a layer of skin and his jaw jarred into his head.

When Mitchell staggered to his feet, all the teacups were spinning the same way. He looked round the circle. There she was – in a compartment two along from Mitchell’s. Suddenly, she leapt up, rolled over in mid-air and landed in the next teacup.

It was only now that the young man in the charge of the ride noticed that something was going on. Panic twisted his face. He waved his arms about, desperate to remember how to stop the ride in an emergency. He hauled on a lever, but the ride sped up. Everybody’s screams went up a notch in intensity. The man’s face went white and he scrabbled for his walkie-talkie.

“I know what you’re looking for!” the girl shouted again. Then her teacup lifted with three others and changed direction. Mitchell lost sight of her again. He stared at the teacups whizzing around above his head, trying to catch another glimpse of her.

He was only faintly aware of the ride slowing down and the crowd of funfair staff. The music stopped and the screaming stopped with it. The drone of the
machinery gradually came down from its insistent pitch.

Does she really know what I’m looking for
, Mitchell asked himself.
How can she? How can she know who
my target is?

At last, he heard her whisper again: “It’s me.”

Mitchell shuddered. He couldn’t see where the voice had come from. Then, on the other side of the ride, he caught a glimpse of a shadow. It was a figure that leapt from the top level and rolled in mid-air. As soon as she landed, she was gone. If any normal person had jumped off a moving fairground ride like that, they would have broken limbs. That’s how Mitchell knew for sure.

He jumped up and caught the edge of the teacup above him. The kid next to him was left stunned, licking ice-cream off his cheeks. Mitchell gently swung round half the circle. The ride had almost stopped now, but he used what momentum was left to heave himself off again.

The ground came to meet him with a surprising bump. Mitchell smiled as his programming cushioned the pain. He just hoped none of the other kids were stupid enough to try and copy him.

He knew he was too late to chase after the girl. He knew she would be racing away at a pace too fast to catch. For now. Instead, he jogged in the direction she had gone, away from the fairground, across the park and back into the urban jungle of Fontenay-aux-Roses.
Mitchell didn’t need to meet his NJ7 contact any more. He had just met ZAF-1.

“Having a nice little Parisian holiday?” Miss Bennett asked sarcastically. She and Mitchell were on a bench in the Place des Vosges, both huddled against the cold. The geometric lawns were precisely trimmed and the canopy of leaves above them dappled the whole square with shadows. The trees clearly thought it was early Spring, though you would never have guessed it from the temperature.

“I found ZAF-1,” Mitchell announced. He wasn’t in the mood for Miss Bennett’s teasing. He had a job to do. “She’s a girl.”

Miss Bennett raised an eyebrow. “How’s her health?” she asked. She kept her voice low, while three or four metres in front of them a lone child was building a tiny castle in the sandpit – or was it a chateau? Meanwhile his mother stood by, desperate to get back indoors.

“She’s not dead, if that’s what you mean,” Mitchell replied.

“So you know where to find her?” Mitchell paused. “What happened?” Miss Bennett went on. “You gave her your number but she’s not calling? Is that it?” There was a cheeky smile playing on her lips. Mitchell decided he didn’t like this playful side to Miss Bennett. He
preferred the way she acted back in the bunkers of NJ7.

“I’ll track her,” Mitchell insisted. “She knew I was looking for her, so she came to check me out. I think she enjoyed the risk – as if it’s a game to her.”

“A game?”

“Maybe. That might be her weakness.”

“Interesting.” Miss Bennett thought for a second, then added, “So you’ve called me out here because you need access to the imagery intelligence for the time after she got away from you, correct?”

“Sort of. You’re right – I need to see what the satellite saw, but not for the time after she got away. She would have been prepared for that and made sure she couldn’t be tracked by satellite.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Track her backwards,” Mitchell explained. “Find the point when I saw her, then work backwards so I can see where she was before then – not where she went afterwards.”

“You intrigue me, Mitchell Glenthorne. What have you got planned?”

In front of them, the little boy had finished his sandcastle. Now he smashed his fists into it, mashing sand into the fibres of his mittens. His gleeful giggle echoed round the square.

“Wherever she’s been,” said Mitchell, “she’ll go again – sooner or later. And when she does, I’ll pick up her
trail. No matter how clever she thinks she is or where she goes, I’ll track her. There’ll be nowhere on earth she can go to get away from me. Then we’ll see whether she likes playing
my
kind of games.”

As soon as Jimmy saw Chinatown, he knew that Viggo had been right. He couldn’t imagine anywhere else on earth where they would be better hidden – not a cave in the middle of a desert, and not halfway up a mountain in Outer Mongolia. He’d never seen so many people crowding in the streets – even in the centre of London. They all bustled against each other, shoulder to shoulder across the width of the road.

Viggo had abandoned the mini-van a few streets away and now they were all following him. Every other step, Jimmy was delighted by a thick and exotic smell that he didn’t quite recognise. Above him, the night air was illuminated by a million neon lights in every colour. It was mostly Mandarin lettering, but with some Korean and Japanese. Suddenly, Jimmy realised that for the first time in his life he could tell the difference.

He picked a word at random. To his eyes it was just
a collection of lines and squiggles, but he heard himself sounding it out under his breath:

“
Mian tiao
,” he whispered. “Noodles!”

“Where?” Felix blurted out. “I’m up for noodles. But shouldn’t we follow Chris?”

Jimmy shook his head in wonder. He knew his programming gave him the ability to speak French, but he never imagined he would be able to read and understand Chinese.

He felt himself starting to relax. Surely there was no way NJ7 could find them here. But he couldn’t allow his concentration to wander.
In a crowd, a killer can come
out of nowhere
, he thought. He deliberately tightened his shoulders. Every time the lights reflected off a watch or a mobile phone, he flinched, imagining it was the blade of a knife aimed at his throat.

“Don’t worry, mate,” said Felix. “We’ll go for noodles later. Or
dum sum
. ”

“Do you mean
dim sum
?” Georgie chuckled.

“Yeah, whatever, we can get some of that as well if you like.”

Gradually, Jimmy noticed how different New York was to how he had expected. The streets were as dirty as they were at home, and a few of the shop fronts were boarded up – not as many as in London, but some. Jimmy had imagined it would be a place where everything was clean and everyone was successful.

“America’s not like it is on TV,” he whispered to Felix. “It’s as miserable as England. If this is a
real
democracy, it looks just the same as a
Neo
-democracy.”

“Yeah,” Felix agreed, “but they have real Coke here. I think that’s the difference.”

Viggo stopped beneath one of the only English signs in the street. It was a bright orange neon announcing the ‘Star of Manchuria’.

“Is this us?” Felix shouted above the hubbub of the crowd. Viggo nodded. “Awesome,” Felix went on, clenching his fist. “We get to stay in a restaurant.” He pushed past Jimmy and opened the door. It rang a little bell as he entered and a venetian blind clattered against the glass. Before Viggo could stop them, Jimmy followed.

The smell hit them first. It was almost overpowering – so much stronger than it had been in the street, but utterly wonderful. Every face in the room turned to stare at them. One man had a string of noodles still dangling from his mouth. Even the immense carp in the fish tank next to them seemed to have paused to examine Felix and Jimmy.

“Er, hello,” Felix announced meekly. He grinned, revealing the gap between his two front teeth and stretching the faint freckles on his cheeks into fat oblongs. Then a face appeared on the other side of the fish tank. The water magnified it and warped it into a hideous mess of distorted features. It rose from the
depths and emerged over the other side of the tank as the face of a small Oriental lady.

Her wrinkles looked like scratches, as if a cat had once attacked her face. But the only thing that had really attacked her was time. She immediately started screeching at the top of her voice. It was a passionate tirade of incomprehensible sounds. Jimmy felt like each syllable was attacking his brain. His mind was trying to keep up, throwing up the meanings of odd words but moving far too slowly. Each phrase echoed in his head, obscuring the next one, until all he could hear was a babble of disjointed English, mixed with every foreign language in the world.

His head was swimming. He staggered to one side and held himself up against the fish tank.

“OK, OK!” It was Viggo, waving his hands about, trying to put this woman at ease. But she didn’t stop. Jimmy took a deep breath and again tried to piece together some of what she was saying. He couldn’t keep hold of any of the words long enough to string them together.

Viggo bundled Jimmy and Felix out of the restaurant. The others were waiting, confused about what was going on.

“Come on,” Viggo whispered. “We’re not staying
in
a restaurant; we’re staying above it.”

He hurriedly pulled out a key from his pocket and unlocked the door right next to the restaurant
entrance. This one had no window, no menu and no ‘open’ sign. Behind it was nothing but a grimy staircase covered in a stained brown carpet. It was torn at the edges, where the dirt blended into the walls. There was no light.

Without hesitating, Viggo marched up the stairs. Felix was next in line, but was unsure whether to follow. Jimmy gave his friend an encouraging shove from behind.

“All right,” Felix moaned, scrunching up his nose. “I’m going. But I prefer the smell of the street.”

“You would,” Jimmy quipped. They all followed Viggo up the stairs, to the rooms above the Star of Manchuria.

“Why was that Chinese lady shouting at us?” Felix whispered when they reached the second floor.

“That’s Mrs Kai-Ro,” answered Viggo. “She runs this place. She’s agreed to hide us for a while.”

“She is one angry lady.”

“She’s not Chinese,” Jimmy blurted out suddenly.

“What?” asked Felix.

“You said, ‘that Chinese woman’ but…” Jimmy paused, surprising himself with his own certainty, “…she’s Korean.”

Felix stopped and turned to stare at him. His mouth hung open. Jimmy smiled sheepishly. Finally, Felix unfroze and exploded with excitement.

“Oh my God,” he gushed. “YOU SPEAK KOREAN! That is SO COOL!”

Jimmy tried to explain that he still needed a bit of practice before he’d really be able to speak to Mrs Kai-Ro, but that didn’t dampen Felix’s enthusiasm.

“All right, Felix,” said his mother. “That’s enough.”

Viggo unlocked another door and they filed into the second-floor rooms. They were as dingy as the staircase: a living area with a beaten-up couch, an old TV and one corner that had been converted into a tiny kitchen; a bedroom with no furniture at all, just a couple of mattresses on the floor; and a bathroom that looked like a cave made of damp and rust. It smelled like one too. The small square window opened on to a fire escape at the back of the building. Beyond that was a tiny courtyard where the bins were kept.

“We’ve got the next floor up as well,” Viggo announced, flicking on the light – a bare bulb in the centre of the room. “Neil and Olivia, why don’t you take the room upstairs, and then…” He cut himself off. He and Jimmy’s mother were standing awkwardly by the door to the remaining bedroom. They glanced at each other and Helen’s face went red. So did Viggo’s. “Erm, no, wait…”

“How about girls upstairs, boys down here?” Neil suggested quickly.

Everybody murmured their agreement. Georgie, Helen Coates and Felix’s mother, Olivia, dragged themselves up one more flight of stairs.

Suddenly, Jimmy clasped the side of his head and cried out in pain.

“What is it?” Viggo demanded.

“My head,” Jimmy gasped. His eyes were watering and he could hardly speak. “It’s that pain… ah! In my ear…”

“This happened to him this morning as well,” Felix added. “He should see a doctor.”

“The last thing we want is a civilian doctor examining him,” said Viggo. Then he turned back to Jimmy. “Are you OK?”

Jimmy wiped his face with his hands. “Yeah,” he said wearily. “It’s gone now. It’s always the same. It’s like a stab right here.” He pointed to the side of his head, where his ear met his skull, but at that moment, the light flickered and died. The room was pitch black.

“Jimmy,” Felix whispered. “You caused a power cut.”

“No way,” Jimmy protested. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything, did I?” He searched his programming, terrified that it really had been him that had caused the darkness.

Gradually, a noise filtered through to them from the restaurant below. It cut through the building almost as much as Jimmy’s strange headache had pierced his brain. It was the furious rant of an old Korean woman whose restaurant had been disrupted by a power cut.

“She is definitely one angry lady,” Felix whispered.

“The whole block is out,” came the deep tones of Neil Muzbeke. “I don’t think it could be you, Jimmy.” He was standing at the living-room window, overlooking the street. His voice always came as a comfort to Jimmy, and even more so now.

“Let’s just sit tight,” Viggo suggested. “I’m sure this is nothing to do with us.” Jimmy appreciated him saying it, but there was still a note of doubt in the man’s voice.

“Everyone OK down there?” Jimmy’s mother shouted down.

“Yeah,” Viggo yelled back. “All good.”

With the lights off, time seemed to stretch so that every second lingered in the air, refusing to pass. Jimmy looked over the faces of the others. They were lost without the light, frozen still. Only Jimmy had night-vision, of course, and yet he was wishing harder than any of them that the wait would be over. In those moments, he imagined what it would be like if he could control time. He could make these minutes of darkness flash past in a single blink, so nobody would notice them. Then he could slow everything down, stretching the hours into years so that he would never reach the age of twelve.

Jimmy tortured himself with that single thought. If he never reached twelve, he would never reach thirteen. Then he would never reach eighteen, and his powers would become no stronger than they were now. He could stay as human as he would ever be. The assassin
in him would die before it was ever fully born. But that was just a fantasy. Every second Jimmy breathed, even here and now while the lights were out, his programming grew inside him. It hurtled him towards his fate: total submission to the assassin inside.