The Reluctant Assassin (2 page)

Chevron Savano had never particularly cared for the parable of the Prodigal Son. In fact, it could be said that she hated that particular story and had to grit her teeth whenever some lecturing type brought it up.

Really? Was that so? And what about the son, or daughter, who has stayed in the fold and worked through holidays and weekends to keep the fold safe from organized crime and corruption? What about the daughter who has sacrificed just about everything to make sure that
the fold
didn’t come under threat? What about
that
daughter? Well, apparently that daughter got shipped off to London to babysit an overseas witness-protection safe house, which seemed to be pretty much a career-killing assignment, as far as she could tell.

Special Agent Lawrence Witmeyer, her FBI boss in the LA office, had assured her that she was not being unofficially punished for her recent, very public embarrassment of the Bureau.

‘This is an important assignment, Chevie. Vital in fact. WARP has a thirty-year history in the Bureau.’

‘What does WARP even stand for?’ Savano had asked.

Witmeyer checked the email on his screen. ‘Er … WARP: Witness Anonymous Relocation Programme.’

‘That sounds like they threw in
Anonymous
to fit the name WARP. Otherwise they’d have WRP and what kind of acronym would that be?’

‘I guess they wanted to make it sound cool. You know these name guys.’

Chevie fumed. It was obvious that the Bureau was tucking her out of the way in London where the press might not find her.

‘I did my job, you know? I saved lives.’

‘I know you did,’ said Witmeyer, softening for a moment. ‘Chevron, you have a choice here. The rest of the group accepted the decommissioning package. You’re sixteen years old, you could do whatever you want.’

‘Except be a Fed.’

‘You were never a real agent, Chevie. You were an official source of intelligence. That’s a very different thing.’

‘But it said
agent
on my badge. My handler called me Agent Savano.’

Witmeyer smiled at Chevie as though she were five years old. ‘We thought you kids would like a badge. You know, to make you feel important. But it takes more than a badge, Chevie.’

‘I was on the fast track to being a proper agent. I was told that all I had to do was complete my assignment and a place in Quantico would be mine.’

‘You were
told
,’ said Witmeyer. ‘But there was nothing in writing. Take the deal, Miss Savano. It’s a good one. And, maybe, if you keep your head down, we can talk about Quantico in a few years.’

Chevie was not interested in the deal, but, if she wanted to be a real Special Agent, England was her only option.

‘So I report to the London office?’

Witmeyer looked shiftier than usual. ‘Nope. You report directly to WARP. The London office works mostly on hate crimes, that kind of thing. What you’ll be doing is not connected to their day-to-day operations. They won’t even know you’re in the country unless you call in.’ Witmeyer looked around excitedly, as though about to deliver
amazing
news. ‘In effect, you’ll have nothing to do but study distance-learning modules for your high-school diploma.’

Chevie sighed. ‘So it’s back to school for the little kid.’

‘I hate to tell you this, Chevie, but you are a kid,’ said Witmeyer, glancing over Chevie’s shoulder, anxious to shut this meeting down and join the other agents clack-clacking their weapons in the bustling office space beyond. ‘I’m giving you double years for your pension, Chevie. That’s the best I can do. You can take the pension offer or not. Either way, if you want any chance of staying on at the Bureau, you’re going to London.’

So Chevie had been in England for nine months, babysitting a metal capsule that looked an awful lot like an Apollo landing module that had been stuffed into the basement of a four-storey Georgian house on Bedford Square in Bloomsbury.

‘What do we actually do here?’ she had asked her boss on the first morning. His name, believe it or not, was Agent Orange, which must be some kind of alias, and he was grey from head to toe, from his floppy quiff to his sunglasses and his skinny suit, right down to his custom-made tasselled loafers.

‘We attend the pod,’ said the fifty-year-old agent, his Scottish accent making the word
attend
about three seconds longer than it needed to be.

‘What are we, podites?’ said Chevie, still jet-lagged and feeling a little belligerent.

Orange took the question seriously. ‘In a way. Yes, Agent Savano. That pod downstairs is your church.’

He led Chevie through the lobby area, which was decked out like a three-star English hotel, complete with fire dogs and a ship in a bottle, down into a basement with a reinforced steel door. Once they got past that door, things got real FBI real quick. Chevie spotted over a dozen cameras in the concrete walls, there were motion-sensor bugs all over the corridor, and every type of information cable known to man was threaded through a grey conduit.

‘Nice conduit,’ said Chevie drily. ‘Goes with your … everything.’

Orange coughed. ‘Agent Witmeyer did mention that I am your superior?’

‘Negative on that,’ lied Chevie. ‘He said we were partners.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ said Orange. ‘In fact, I am only referring to you as
Agent
as a courtesy. From what I hear, you’re being stashed in London after the ill-conceived
high-school initiative
went south.’

They passed a holding cell and a well-stocked infirmary, then the corridor widened into a circular chamber, which housed a ten-foot-tall pyramid-shaped metal pod, covered in refrigeration tubes and complicated groups of blinking lights.

‘This is WARP central,’ said Orange, patting the casing fondly.

‘It looks like a sci-fi Christmas tree,’ said Chevie, doing her best not to be impressed.

Orange checked a number of readouts; it really looked like he knew what he was doing.

‘I was expecting this attitude,’ he said, without facing Chevie. ‘I read your file. Most informative. Graduated top of your special group. Record test scores in spite of your age. Problem with authority figures,
blah blah blah
, so much so movie stereotype.’ Orange turned finally to Chevie. ‘We both know why you’re here, Agent Savano. Your group was an embarrassment to the Bureau and a potential legal minefield, because of your age. You messed up for the cameras in Los Angeles, so they sent you overseas on a quiet posting, but, in spite of what you may think, what we do here is important, Agent. There shall be no cutting of slack because of your youth.’

Chevie glared
.
‘Don’t worry, Agent. I don’t expect slack and I don’t cut any.’

Orange thrust a hand inside the pod, checking the temperature. ‘I’m glad to hear it. It is more than likely that your un-slackened talents will never be called upon. On most days a man probably won’t come out of the WARP pod, so you don’t have to do anything except study for your diploma. But on the off-chance that this very special man does emerge from that hatch when I am out, you need to keep him alive. Just keep him alive and call me. That’s it.’

‘Is the man in there now?’

‘No, Agent. The pod is empty at the moment, and has been for thirty years.’

‘So it’s a magic pod?’

Orange smiled in a way that told Chevie that he knew quite a lot that she didn’t. ‘Not magic, exactly. Magical, maybe.’

‘Yep, that makes a lot of sense.’

‘That’s all the sense you’re going to get out of me today, Agent Savano. Maybe when you’ve proven yourself as a serious podite I’ll share some details. Until then you live on-site, you never stray more than a mile from the house, and I watch the pod while you sleep.’

‘Where do I sleep?’

‘The flat upstairs. You’ll love it.’

‘Where do you sleep? In bonnie Scotland?’

Orange smiled again. ‘The top floor. I get the penthouse. One perk of being the boss.’

He handed Chevie a smartphone. ‘All the numbers are pre-programmed. And there are apps for the alarm and surveillance. You see this alarm-button icon? Don’t press that if you don’t want all hell breaking loose. Got it?’

Chevie took the phone. ‘I got it, Agent.’

‘Good.’ Orange turned back to the pod, his fingers tripping across multiple old-fashioned plastic keyboards bolted on to its surface. ‘If you do well here, keep your head down for a couple of years, then let’s see if we can’t sneak you back into the US without the press noticing. By that time you will be almost old enough to apply for Quantico.’

Chevie scowled at Orange’s grey back. In two years she would be ancient. Almost nineteen
.

‘Wow, that would be great. Two years’ babysitting. I am so glad I did all those firearms courses.’

Orange left the pod chamber without looking back. ‘Keep trying, Agent,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Some day you will say something that is actually funny.’

I hate that guy already
, thought Chevie Savano.

Now, several months later, Chevie had lost touch with most of her friends in California, while she waited for some mystery guy to pop out of a space pod in the basement. She hadn’t fired her weapon once, even on a firing range, which made her extremely nervous, and she realized that she was not only talking to herself on a regular basis but answering herself too.

‘You need to stop that,’ she said to herself. ‘People will think you’re crazy.’

Really? What people? It wasn’t as if she had talked to anybody other than Orange for over six weeks. She had even celebrated her seventeenth birthday on her own with a chocolate brownie and a single pathetic candle.

The house on Bedford Square had become like her second home, or maybe her prison. She knew every inch of the building better than she knew her own cottage on the Malibu Bluffs, where she could legally live alone when she turned eighteen in less than a year.

There was one room in the Bedford Square house that she did love, and this was the studio. At some point in the house’s history a dancer had converted a large part of the second floor into a dance studio, complete with a mirror wall and barre. Not that Chevie Savano was a dancer, but she was a gym girl, and it had only taken three weeks of nagging to get Orange to sign off on a few thousand pounds for weights and machines.

On this evening, which was to prove eventful but had started out pretty same-old same-old, Chevie had spent her last stress-free moments for quite some time looking at herself in the mirror and thinking,
Girl, where is your life going?

It was hardly a mystery.

Usually federal agents had to be twenty-three years of age minimum before they could wear the shield, but Chevie had been part of a trial programme to combat the increasing problem of terrorist infiltration of high schools. A hand-picked group of state wards had spent a semester in Quantico, and had then been placed undercover in various schools attended by suspected sympathizers, in a strictly observational capacity. No infiltration, no confrontation. Chevie had spent six months in LA keeping tabs on an Iranian family whom the Feds believed were trying to start a cell in California. The assignment had ended with a public disaster outside a Los Angeles theatre where Chevie had used her training to disarm a drunken teen who’d been threatening the Iranians. Unfortunately the teen had been wounded in the process and the entire fiasco was captured on a camera phone. The hothouse programme was hurriedly shut down and Chevie was whisked off to London for babysitting duty so a senate committee would not cotton on to the fact that the agent involved in the Hollywood Centre Affair was a minor.

Chevie did thirty minutes of cardio, thirty minutes of core, then shadowboxed in the mirror until her Lycra leggings and vest were dark with sweat. She was in good enough shape to whip the top ten percent of law-enforcement officers anywhere in the world. And she could shoot an apple off a tree at a hundred paces.

As far as Chevie could see, she looked pretty much the same as she had at sixteen. At five feet six she was a little short for an FBI agent, but she was lithe and fast, with a delicate oval face and the glossy black hair typical of Native Americans.

I am going to get through this assignment, she thought. They don’t get rid of Chevron Savano so easily. There are worse things than boredom.

Riley could not for the life of him have described his predicament. Had there been a Bible handy, he could not have testified on it as to whether he was alive or dead. His thoughts were a jumble of fear and confusion, and he found that the tough, stoical core of his spirit, which had kept him going through the terrifying years with Garrick, was totally absent.

His senses were spun together like the muddy streams flowing into the Thames, and he felt an urge to vomit that was somehow in his mind and not his gut.

He ordered his hand to wave, but nothing happened; or perhaps it did and he could not see it.

It seemed somehow that there was a light up ahead, glowing like a streetlamp. Though Riley could neither see the light nor calculate in which direction “up ahead” lay, he somehow knew these things to be true.

I am about to arrive, he realized.

Chevie stood in front of the mirror and watched her image split in two. For the briefest moment she thought that she had finally gone stir-crazy; then she realized that the mirror had cracked from roof to ceiling.