Hit List
Authors: Jack Heath
For my grandparents, Maisie and Bill.
I’m so lucky to be part of the family you made.
First published in the UK in 2012 by Usborne Publishing Ltd., Usborne House, 83–85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England.
www.usborne.com
First published in 2010. Text copyright © Jack Heath, 2010
The right of Jack Heath to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Aeroplane photo © Paul Chauncey / Alamy
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of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to
actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Epub ISBN 9781409541714
Kindle ISBN 9781409541721
Batch no. 00654-02
Practice. It would take practice, but it could be done.
He moved around the empty room in circles, aerosol can in his hand, dodging invisible bystanders. Occasionally he paused, and stepped back with his head bowed, as if to allow someone to walk
past.
The motions were easy. The more difficult part was maintaining an expression of faint surprise and curiosity – eyebrows up, head slightly tilted, lips curled into a lopsided grin. Like
he’d spotted an old friend on the opposite side of a crowded room, and was going over to say hi. His intention was to look non-threatening, yet unapproachable to anyone who crossed his
path.
He walked, he paused, he sidestepped, he kept walking. The only sound was the wind, keening at the broken window in the attic.
There were rumours that this house was haunted – rumours he reinforced at every opportunity. It would be inconvenient if someone purchased it and moved in. So he spent many nights turning
battery-powered lights on and off in various rooms, throwing things at the walls to produce sudden thumps, and playing a battered violin in the attic. Whenever the estate agent brought prospective
buyers around, they found fresh bloodstains on the floorboards, made from a foul-smelling syrup of red wine and barbecue sauce.
He didn’t like to be disturbed. And he would disturb as many other people as it took to avoid it.
The walls of the room he was in were covered in mirrors. Every step of his complicated waltz was mimicked by the dozens of doppelgängers that surrounded him. He stared at them, trying to
see himself as others would. They stared back, each with an equally suspicious gaze.
A twitch of his fingers, and the aerosol can vanished up his sleeve. A flick of the wrist, and it was back in his hand. He rehearsed this over and over, watching the can disappear and reappear
as he walked. It’s there. It’s gone. Now you see it, now you don’t.
With his other hand, he loosened his collar, scratched his neck, ran his fingers through his hair. These motions would draw eyes away from the can, allowing it to come and go unobserved.
After a few more circuits, he came to a sudden halt in front of one of the mirrors. There was a picture taped to it – a teenage girl, on the footpath outside her school, unaware that she
was being photographed.
He stared at her for a long time, memorizing every detail of her features. Then he closed his eyes and visualized them. Oak-brown hair, green irises, teeth not quite crooked enough to require
braces. Narrow shoulders. Unpierced ears.
He opened his eyes again. Her hair was darker than he’d pictured, but otherwise, he’d been very close.
The girl was a chameleon, often hidden behind clever costumes and prosthetic make-up. If his plan was to succeed, if he was to have his revenge, he would need to recognize her instantly. He
needed to know her face as well as he knew his own.
He reached out and touched the photo, tracing the curve of her cheekbones.
“Ashley,” he whispered. Then he walked back to the other side of the room, and started weaving through the imaginary throng once again. Practice makes perfect.
The guard stared down at the grubby pass card. “The thing is,” he said, “you’re not on the personnel list.”
The girl blinked. Wiped the grime off her palms. “Sorry?”
“Your pass is valid,” the guard said uncomfortably, “but I’ve got a list of people to let through, and you’re not on it.” Plus, he thought, I’m not sure
I’ve ever seen you before.
The girl offered him a wry grin. “Does that mean I can go home?”
The guard sighed. “Well...”
“I know,” the girl said, “you’re not supposed to let me in – it’s against regulations. But if I leave, they’re one worker short for the day and the
foreman will say it’s your fault. You could call him up here to sort it out, but then he’ll blame you for wasting everyone’s time.” She scratched her hair under her cap.
“’Course, if he’d done a proper headcount in the first place, there’d be no problem.”
The guard wondered how long the girl had been working down in the mines. Couldn’t have been more than a couple of years – she looked younger than his niece, although the tattoos on
her neck made her at least eighteen. He looked at the pass card again. It was definitely legit.
“How about
I
call him?” the girl said, digging around in the pocket of her overalls. “That way—”
“No,” the guard said. He jerked a thumb towards the mouth of the tunnel. “Go on.”
The girl shrugged. “Sure. Have a good day.”
The guard watched her walk away into the blackness. Then he stepped back into his booth, sat down in the swivel chair and picked up one of the wedding magazines his fiancée had left out
for him. The interesting part of his day was over.
“Benjamin,” Ash whispered, stripping off the overalls to expose a patchy grey suit, made from the same fabric as her cap. “I’m in the outer
tunnel.”
“What took you so long?” His voice was crisp and loud in Ash’s ear, thanks to the new earphones they had bought. No more obvious wires on her neck – the plugs contained
batteries that ran forty-eight hours between recharges, and were coated with rubber that matched Ash’s skin tone exactly. Benjamin was on a boat half a kilometre offshore, but his voice was
as clear as a freshly tuned piano.
“There was a list of miners,” she replied. “But the guard was convinced by the pass card anyway.”
“You’re welcome.”
Ash snorted. “Come on. It’s not like it was hard for you to make, with your new laminating machine and Photoshop.”
“Hey, you need more than just the equipment,” Benjamin said. “You need the skill to use it. Did I say ‘skill’? I meant ‘genius’.”
“Are you done?” Ash asked, distracted. She was walking as fast as she dared down the steep, uneven slope. Iron tracks had been bolted to the ground so mine carts could carry debris
out of the shaft, and the wooden slats would have made good steps – but there was a sodium bulb bored into the roof every five metres, so Ash was sticking to the edge of the tunnel. Her
camouflage was only effective in dim lighting, and she never knew when a mine cart might rattle up out of the gloom.
“Yeah, I’m done,” Benjamin said. “If you need anything, you know where to find me.”
“In my ear?”
“Like always.”
The lights flickered momentarily as someone further down the tunnel started up a jackhammer, diverting a sizeable chunk of the electricity. Ash was glad of the din – now she would be
inaudible as well as invisible.
The noise of the bit repeatedly striking the sandstone was like the clanging of a demented school bell. With a stab of guilt, she realized that school would be starting right about now. She
hoped the forged doctor’s certificate was fooling her teachers, and that the fake excursion note she’d given her dad had convinced him she was at the Museum of Art History. She’d
installed an app on his phone, ensuring any calls he made to the school were redirected to a mobile with a fake answering machine message:
You’ve called Narahm School for Girls. All our
operators are currently busy. Please leave your name, number and reason for phoning after the tone.
Any calls from the school to her father would be redirected to the same phone, but a
different recording:
Hi, this is Ash. Leave a message for me or Mr. Arthur and we’ll get back to you.
But what if her father actually went to the school in person for some reason? What if the school sent a get-well-soon card to her house, and he saw it? What if—
Focus, Ash, she told herself. You’ve taken every possible precaution. You won’t get busted. It’s time to think about the job at hand.
The light was getting brighter and the noise louder. She’d almost reached the dig site. She could smell the broken rocks, and hear the whirring of the generator beneath the shouting of the
miners. She kept her back to the wall, edging sideways down the tunnel.
The tracks had ended, and the grey dirt was getting finer beneath her feet. Time for the gross part. She spat into her hand, and wiped the saliva all over her face. Then she scooped up some of
the dirt with her other hand and dabbed it against her cheeks, forehead and chin. The silty powder stuck to her skin and went crusty, like face paint at a carnival. She couldn’t see herself
to check, but hopefully she no longer looked like a disembodied head floating down the tunnel.