Survival (8 page)

A floodlight on the front of the drill burst on. The white light
was intense and urged Jimmy’s body to respond with pure
speed. He hurtled down the tunnel, his boots pounding the
clay. He could hear the drill catching up on him. As they
chased deeper, the walls of the tunnel closed. He could
see his own shadow ahead of him, stretching out several
metres deeper into the tunnel. It leapt and darted as he
did, and gave him something to chase.

Jimmy’s mind was whizzing as fast as the drill bit
behind his head. Who was this person so desperate
to kill him? The question was pushed out of his mind
when he sprinted round the next bend. Suddenly he
was face to face with a drill that made the one behind
him look like an electric toothbrush.

Its central prong was as thick as a pillar box and
around it were hundreds of smaller blades. It filled the
entire tunnel and whirled like a tornado. And it moved
towards Jimmy. He was trapped.

How had the person behind him managed to activate
this huge borer and turn it around to attack him? Or
had they done it as soon as they saw which tunnel he
was trying to hide down? It didn’t matter. Jimmy had no
choice. He slid to a stop just in time and pushed off
again to head back up the tunnel – but the smaller drill
had already reached him.

Jimmy was trapped. He squeezed himself up against
the wall of the tunnel, the cold of the clay chilling his
spine. The drill from the smaller machine hit its larger
brother with a screech that nearly burst Jimmy’s
eardrums. Massive sparks spat out from the
connection. Some landed on Jimmy’s face and hands,
scorching his skin. Still the two drills edged closer to
each other.

In seconds Jimmy would be mangled by two colliding
blocks of sharp, spinning steel. But Jimmy’s
programming was spinning too, and his determination
was made of steel just as strong. He frantically clawed
at the clay behind his back, scraping with his heels at
the same time. Just a small indent would be enough.

Jimmy felt his whole body trembling with terror, but
his actions seemed controlled by a thick layer of
assurance. It was like being hot and cold at the same
time. Jimmy realised that his body wasn’t quaking with
terror. It was wriggling with all its force to carve out a
hollow for him in the side of the tunnel. He had become
his own drilling machine.

If he could create enough space fast enough, the two
metal slabs could meet each other without making a
minced Jimmy sandwich. He pushed all his strength
into the clay. The drill bit of the smaller machine was
crumpling now under the immense pressure of the
larger device. The steel glowed orange, then red. The
heat blasted into Jimmy.
I’ll be cooked before I’m
crushed
, he thought.

Then suddenly the drill bit snapped free from its
holding. The two machines clapped together like lethal
cymbals. Jimmy’s reflexes were faster than an electric
current. He jerked backwards, pushing all the air from
his lungs and stretching his spine to flatten himself
against the side wall as much as was physically
possible. The steel edge of the drill plate rushed past
his face and scraped the skin from the end of his nose.

Jimmy twisted himself free from his clay tomb. He
wriggled past the body of the smaller drilling machine and
forced himself out, back into the upper section of the
tunnel. As soon as he was free, he ran. He felt the heat on
his back growing. The noise was incredible – a screeching
and whining like a pack of wolves going up in flames.

Jimmy glanced behind him, still running at full pelt. The
two machines were a molten mess of sparks and shards
of steel. And diving from the chaos was that silhouette –
the slim figure with the streak of long black hair. The figure
landed with a graceful roll and at last Jimmy caught sight
of a face, highlighted by the sparks further down the tunnel.

A girl. Young, but older than Jimmy. Just as determined.

She raced away from the drills. With the intense
flickering light behind her, Jimmy could just make out
the strong line of her cheek and the deep black of her
skin. He kept running, but couldn’t help checking over
his shoulder to watch how she moved and what
decisions she made. Any little thing was a clue to her
identity and her motivation.

Then Jimmy saw her trip. As it grew hotter, the clay
around them became less stable. The footing wasn’t
secure and the girl had faltered. Now she was face
down in the dirt.

Then:
BOOM
!

Jimmy thought the noise might crack open his skull.
The heat of the drills, the sparks and the fuel driving
them together – it was a highly volatile combination. A
black globe ballooned up the tunnel towards them. The
heat travelled even faster, nearly knocking Jimmy off his
feet. But the girl was already down.

In that instant, a million connections seemed to burn
in Jimmy’s head. Each one came with an explosion of
contradictory emotions. This young girl had gone to
extreme lengths to kill him – and she’d done extraordinary
things. Zafi’s face flashed into his mind. Then Mitchell’s.
The other assassins. Was it possible that this girl…?

Suddenly Jimmy didn’t care who she worked for. He
didn’t care that seconds before she had been trying to
rip him to pieces. If she was like him…

Jimmy’s muscles jerked to change direction. He leapt
back down the tunnel, head first, and reached out.
He snatched the girl by the hair and snapped his arm
up, pulling her to him.

Locked together, they rolled to the edge of the
tunnel. A metal spike half a metre long stabbed into the
ground at the point where the girl’s neck had been and
stuck there like a flagpole. For a second, Jimmy could
see nothing but the girl’s eyes. They stared back at him,
reflecting the orange and red of the explosion in deep
brown. Then together they scrambled to their feet and
sprinted for the surface. A ball of flame chased at their
backs and clay rained down on their heels. The tunnel
was collapsing behind them.

Jimmy made it back to the pit first. He threw himself on
the ground, panting hard, and held his face in his hands.
The girl burst out of the tunnel after him and collapsed
against the side of the pit, her hands on her knees.

After they had taken just three breaths, they turned
to each other and, in perfect synchrony, shouted,
“Who are you?”

Jimmy’s voice and the girl’s echoed off the concrete walls
of the pit. They backed away from each other to opposite
sides of the circle, both totally alert for an attack. Jimmy
considered making a run for it – he could climb out and
easily get away, but he didn’t want to. Not yet. He had
to know why this girl was trying to kill him.

“If you drill holes in strangers, I’d hate to see your
enemies,” he said. His throat was so dry that his voice
felt like a dagger. When the girl answered she
surprised Jimmy with the deep sweetness of her voice
and the round accent on her vowels – every “oo”
sounded like an “ow”.

“I did believe you to be from the French army, or
British, or German, or…”

“What?” Jimmy blasted. “Does it look like I’m in the
army?” He dabbed blood from the end of his nose and went
through the rest of his body in his head to work out which
bits were seriously damaged and which just hurt like hell.

“Actually, yes,” replied the girl. “Examine yourself.”

Jimmy didn’t need to. He could feel the army boots
bruising his feet and he hadn’t forgotten that
underneath the layer of clay he was in desert
camouflage. The coating of blood and sweat all over his
body completed the picture.

“But I’m twelve,” Jimmy insisted.

“So what?” shrugged the girl. She was obviously in at
least as much pain as Jimmy, but was trying to hide it.
“I am sixteen and I have been fighting for as long as I
can remember. It is what I do.”

“It’s what I do too,” Jimmy mumbled. Then louder,
“But not in the army.” His voice trembled with doubt.
The whole situation was so strange he couldn’t be sure
of anything. If this girl had been fighting for so long,
which Secret Service organisation had trained her?
Or
designed her
, he thought nervously. The questions in his
head felt so important they even distracted from the
pain that throbbed all the way through him.

“Why not in the army?” asked the girl.

Jimmy was fascinated by the way she spoke and
tried to watch how she moved, for clues. She was about
a head taller than Jimmy, and slim; her long black hair
reached her waist. Her combat trousers and thin shirt
hugged her figure. Jimmy could see she was made of
nothing but perfectly lean muscle. Was she 100 per
cent human, or something else?

He remembered that appearances can be misleading:
anybody looking at him would probably think that he was
a normal human.

“Age means nothing if you have something to fight
for,” the girl continued. “All over the world there are
young soldiers. Some fight for a cause; some are forced
to fight. And some fight with me here. I mean…” She
tailed off and froze for a second, with her arm half
raised towards the bloodshed outside.

Jimmy wanted to say something, but what could he
say? And in a way she was right – Jimmy had never
signed up to be in any army, but he’d been created by
British military intelligence and now he was here acting
on instructions from French military intelligence.
One
tattoo and I’d be a soldier,
he realised.

There was still a rumbling from the tunnel they’d
escaped from, as the earth settled into place, but soon
it died and there was a long silence. Jimmy and the girl
threw glances across the pit, each checking that the
other wasn’t going to attack. Both were fully aware that
Jimmy had just saved the girl’s life. Both were trying to
work out exactly why.

From the little the girl had told him, Jimmy was
beginning to suspect that she was probably fully human
after all. The chance of her being another assassin was
just too small. And yet her strength, skills and speed
had been incredible…

“How did you know how to use these drills?” Jimmy
asked eventually.

“I have been studying this place all my life. This is my
country. Which means these should be our resources –
not French. My community is…” She stopped herself
again and all the life in her eyes seemed to die.

Jimmy couldn’t see any way of talking to her without
bringing back all the horror of what must have
happened. He could see something about her – perhaps
it was the way her shoulders slumped forwards, or the
down-turned corners of her mouth. It told him that she
had lost people she cared about.

“How did you survive the missile blasts?” Jimmy asked,
before he realised it was another tactless question.

“I have not survived,” she replied.

“What?” Jimmy tried to laugh, but it came out more
like he was choking.

“I am dead.”

Jimmy wasn’t in the mood for jokes, but the
expression on the girl’s face told him she wasn’t trying
to be funny. Perhaps the confusion was because of her
strange English.

“The blast did not kill me,” she explained, “because
I was lucky. But the radiation will. I may as well already
be dead.” Suddenly panic seemed to attack her. “You
should get out now!” she yelled. “There is actinium
here. The second missile…”

“I know,” Jimmy reassured her. “The heat might have
ionised it. But—”

“It did – I have seen the readings in the control
centre,” she gabbled. “But you perhaps might still
survive. You are not here as long as me and we are far
from the depository. You are perhaps lucky, I—”

“So a minute ago you wanted to drill through my
skull, but now you’re trying to save my life?”

The girl shrugged. “You saved mine,” she said softly.
“In the tunnel. It means you are not French or British.”

Jimmy felt a laugh coming, but the pain in his
ribs killed it.

“I am sorry,” said the girl. “I was wrong to attack you.”
She looked around, everywhere but at Jimmy. Where
had all that self-confidence gone? “I am Marla Rakubian,”
she said, pulling herself up to stand tall again.

“Marla,” replied Jimmy, “I’m Jimmy and I need you to
take me to the actinium.”

“What?” Her eyes expanded into huge circles.

“It’s complicated. But can you take me there?”

“No,” Marla insisted. “You are already too exposed.
You will definitely get ill, but you might still survive. If I take
you closer the damage will be worse. You will die. It is too
late for me, but you can still survive if you leave now.”

Jimmy didn’t listen to what Marla was saying. He
was already climbing out of the pit. He saw for the first
time that the pit was the centrepiece of a large
warehouse. The space at ground level was filled with
more drills, more machinery, scaffolding and stacks of
equipment that reached to the ceiling, high above him.

One thing in particular caught his eye: the control deck
Marla had used to send the drills to attack him. It set off
a chain of thought in his head that ran with the force of
an express train. He pictured the drills hurtling down the
tunnels, all at the same time. He imagined the heat and
the sparks, and the fuel in their engines. He heard the
rumble of the shock waves through the ground below.

I could collapse the whole tunnel complex
, he thought,
without realising he was even thinking it.
Dozens of small
explosions. A chain reaction. Destroy everything
…

He clutched his head in his hands. “No!” he
screamed. His heart was pounding.
Do this properly
, he
ordered himself.
Don’t waste this chance
. “Make them
listen!” he shouted.

Marla had been talking all this time, but she stopped
at Jimmy’s outburst. Jimmy was motionless except for
the heaving of his chest. Then slowly he lifted his head
and looked at Marla. She stared back.

“Take me to the actinium,” Jimmy insisted. There
was a long pause. Thousands of thoughts were fighting
each other in his head. Finally he drew himself to his
full height and sighed. “I suppose I should explain a
couple of things about myself…”

Helen, Georgie and Felix were being housed by NJ7 in a
council estate in Chalk Farm, North London. And they
were being watched. The place was perfect from a
surveillance point of view – a ground-floor flat with no back
door. And there was a raised walkway separating the front
door from the road, so nobody could run straight into a
car without being seen first – and shot if necessary.

Zafi kept her head down, with her hair tucked up
inside her cap, but her eyes took in everything as she
swept along the street. The more she saw, the more
she was impressed by NJ7. They’d chosen the perfect
spot: the corner of a busy junction, with no tall buildings
or trees to interrupt the views along the four roads that
converged here. Hardly realising she was doing it, Zafi
counted the buses and noted how often they pulled up
at the bus stop in front of the building.

Directly opposite the estate was the perfect
surveillance base – the Gregor’s Elbow pub. The paint-
work was chipped and faded, and the pavement all
around it was carpeted with pigeon droppings. But
more importantly, it wasn’t too busy and wasn’t too
deserted. Nobody would notice the extra coming and
going. Nobody but Zafi, that is.

She glanced up at the flats above the pub. There
were boards on the windows, but a chink of light crept
through on the second floor. Were there NJ7 agents
inside, huddled over video equipment? There wasn’t any
need for them to be on site – it was quite simple to have
all the surveillance data transmitted to NJ7
Headquarters, in real time.
They want agents here,
Zafi
realised
. In case Viggo comes. Or even Jimmy
.

She hurried past the block and along Malden Road,
one of the adjacent streets. She couldn’t help smiling.
Thanks to Jimmy blowing up the oil rig – and wearing
a mask while he did it – NJ7 thought she was dead
too. It made her task much easier.

But she immediately tensed up again. She couldn’t let
herself be seen, or have her face caught on camera.
And now she started to spot agents everywhere. They
weren’t just relying on their cameras and microphones.
Zafi picked out a plasterer in one of the houses. He was
wearing jeans that fitted him too well. There was also a
parking attendant who wasn’t issuing any tickets. To Zafi,
they couldn’t have been more obviously NJ7 agents if
they’d had green stripes stamped on their foreheads.

Then finally Zafi saw something that NJ7 hadn’t been
able to control. Rolling towards her in a straggling bunch
were half a dozen boys. One was definitely older than her
– he must have been at least sixteen. He was dragging
his bike along with him. The others looked between
thirteen and fifteen. But Zafi wasn’t bothered about age.
Her eye homed in on the shortest: a pale boy, not much
taller than Zafi, swaggering across the pavement with a
grim smirk on his face, barely visible beneath the huge
hoodie that cloaked his whole head.
Perfect
, thought Zafi.

By the time this gang had noticed Zafi, she already
knew exactly what they were going to say to each other
and what they were going to do to her. Or try to do. Her
ear picked up their conversation at a distance, while
her instincts read their body language. Then, when
most people would have done their best to get o
t of
the way, Zafi made sure she walked straight into them.

“Hey,” grunted the boy with the bike.

Zafi immediately turned to him, grimaced and
puffed out her chest. “You asking for it?” she barked,
perfectly imitating the London accent and the rhythm
of the boy’s speech.

“You what?” His face was a mixture of confusion and
amusement. He looked round at his mates and gave an
awkward laugh. Zafi held herself totally still, staring up at
the boy, who was at least 50 centimetres taller than her.

“Get out my way,” the boy ordered, his face returning
to his usual sneer.

“It’s
my
way,” Zafi snapped back. “But I’ll let you walk
on it.”

The boy ignored her and shoved his way past, jerking
his elbow at Zafi’s face. She calmly swayed backwards
to avoid it and let him walk on. But the others were
eyeing her, half amused, half nervous.

“Sorry, mate,” Zafi called out after him. “Can’t talk to
you now, I’ve got to go and fix your mum’s face.”

The boy whipped round, scarlet with shock.
“You wh—?”

“Calm down,” Zafi cut him off. “I’ll try your sister’s
too, but I’m a plastic surgeon, not a miracle worker.”

The boy lurched at Zafi, stumbling over his bike, but
Zafi darted away with ease, slipping between two
houses to escape. She could hear the others yelling and
chasing after her, but it didn’t matter. There was no way
they could catch her.
You’ll see me later
, she thought,
already concentrating on the next stage of her plan and
heading for the nearest grocery shop.

Half an hour later she was climbing up the fire escape
at the back of the Gregor’s Elbow. She was so light on
her feet she barely made a sound. When she reached
the roof she sprinted across to the other side of the
building and lay down on her front, ready to watch.

She had a perfect view of the flat where Helen,
Georgie and Felix were living. She knew that soon
Georgie and Felix would be coming home from school,
so she waited. Meanwhile she turned her attention to
the transmission equipment on the roof next to her.

NJ7 had set up a sophisticated network of receivers –
black metal boxes of various sizes, wires and small dishes,
all pointed straight at the flat’s front door. Without
touching the equipment, Zafi made a quick analysis of the
structure of the system and waved her hands around the
various parts, assessing which were warm and which
were cold. She was relying on the fact that all the visual
and aural feeds from the whole operation came to this
unit, before being relayed downstairs to the flat, where the
agents could watch and listen.

From her examination it looked like she was right,
but she knew that almost anything she did to tamper
with the unit would backfire. It was probably alarmed,
and in any case, it would be immediately obvious to all
of the agents in the area that somebody was on the
roof disrupting their equipment.