Awol 1 agent without lic.., p.14
AWOL 1 Agent Without Licence, page 14
‘So we get medals?’ Sam asked.
‘What?’
‘Medals? For exposing a traitor in MI6?’
Kieron shook his head firmly. ‘We are not getting medals. We are not even going to suggest getting medals. We’re just going to help Bex and Bradley.’ And maybe, just maybe, he thought, get a job out of this.
They headed back to Kieron’s mum’s flat.
She still hadn’t returned, which wasn’t much of a surprise, so Kieron made them cheese and ham sandwiches and poured a couple of glasses of cola from a bottle in the fridge.
‘You want to stay tonight?’ he asked Sam as he took the food into his bedroom. ‘I’ve got a spare sleeping bag from when we went away for outdoor ed.’
‘I think the dog ate mine,’ Sam replied. ‘Yeah, I don’t fancy walking back home now, and I’m not going to drive that van by myself.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You know what – we could sell the van! That would definitely get us enough money for those gig tickets we were talking about this morning!’
That morning. Kieron felt a suddenly wave of surprise wash over him. Just that morning his life had been a lot simpler. And, to be fair, a lot more boring. But so much had happened in just twelve hours.
‘Let’s worry about that when things have calmed down,’ he said eventually. ‘But it’s not a bad idea.’
Sam bit into the sandwich. ‘Why do you think Blood and Soil are called that?’ he asked through a mouthful of food, then frowned. ‘What did you say this sandwich was?’
‘Cheese and ham.’
‘Don’t taste like any cheese and ham I’m familiar with.’
Kieron sighed. ‘Mum’s got this thing about not just buying “basic” foods, even though they’re cheaper, so she sometimes buys what she calls “treats” – the cheese is emmenthal and the ham is Serrano. She says it makes her feel like we’re not living on the breadline.’
‘Yeah,’ Sam said, ‘about this bread …’
‘Don’t get me started.’ Kieron signed. ‘OK, Blood and Soil. I’ve got a feeling that a lot of fascist and Nazi groups have this thing about land, and blood, and belonging. The people in charge motivate the grunts at the bottom of the food chain by appealing to their basic instincts. Everyone wants to belong to something.’
‘We don’t,’ Sam observed. ‘We’re greebs!’
Kieron stared at him for a few seconds. ‘You just don’t see the irony, do you?’
‘I failed irony at school.’ Sam shrugged. ‘Good marks in sarcasm and flippancy though.’ He indicated the glasses Kieron was still wearing. ‘Anything from your friend in Mumbai?’
‘No – I suspect she’s asleep now. Which, by the way, is what we should be doing. We’ve got a meeting between a traitorous secret service agent and a bunch of mad fascists to spy on tomorrow.’
‘Can you do me a favour?’ Sam said quietly. ‘Can you rephrase that comment so it doesn’t suddenly sound like a really bad idea?’
‘Do you want to check in with her anyway?’ Sam asked. ‘These secret agents don’t work normal office hours, you know?’
Nodding his agreement, Kieron activated the ARCC glasses.
They connected immediately with Bex’s glasses, passing him the image they showed: a carpet and a wall, tilted, as if they were lying on their side, abandoned.
CHAPTER TEN
When Bex woke up her immediate reaction was to do nothing: just lie there with her eyes closed using her other senses to determine what might be going on around her. There was no point in letting her abductors know that she had regained consciousness. If she wanted some kind of advantage, then she had to gather as much information as possible as quickly as possible.
She was lying on her back, and it was daytime. She could see sunlight shining through her eyelids and feel it on her skin. The temperature was warm but not uncomfortable, which meant air-conditioning. That, or she wasn’t in India any more, but there was something about the faint smell of spice and flowers in the air that suggested she hadn’t been moved out of the country. Besides which, her own body-clock told her that she hadn’t been unconscious for more than a few hours.
She could feel thick cotton sheets beneath her fingers. They seemed to be good quality as well – decently woven with a high thread-count. Maybe a hotel, or possibly a private hospital?
She deliberately made a moaning noise and turned over onto her side, not because she was uncomfortable but because she wanted to see if she might be connected to any medical equipment: intravenous drips, heart-rate monitors, blood-pressure monitors, any of those machines that made regular and annoying bing or beep sounds. Nothing tugged at her arms, so she was probably free of any medical impediments that would hold her back if she suddenly decided to leap out of the bed and make a run for it. She was also unrestrained as well: nothing tying her arms or legs to each other or to the bed.
So far, so good. If it hadn’t been for the distinct memory of being shot by some strange device in the hotel corridor then she might just have lain there for a while, soaking up the luxury.
Yes, that strange device. Something like a grenade launcher – muzzle the size of a drainpipe – but she didn’t feel like she’d been injured at all.
Something creaked nearby. It sounded like a person shifting position in a chair. She listened more closely, but apart from a distant whoosh that she assumed was the air-conditioning, she couldn’t hear any other noise.
She breathed in through her nose, and detected another scent apart from the flowers and the hint of spice. If she wasn’t mistaken, it was aftershave. Quite strong aftershave, but very pleasant. Not your bog-standard Saturday night nightclub smell. This one was floral, with hints of lime and sandalwood. Daniel Hechter, maybe.
‘You’re safe,’ a voice said. A very mellifluous voice: smooth and dark, like coffee. ‘You’re also awake, I think. Your breathing abruptly changed about two minutes ago, as did the movement of your eyes behind your eyelids. Don’t worry – you have nothing to fear.’
If the game was up then the game was up. No point pretending any more. Bex opened her eyes and sat up.
She was wearing the same clothes she’d been in the night before, and she was in a pleasant bedroom. To her left a window showed a view of blue sky and a hillside. To her right a man sat stiffly in a large leather armchair. He was Indian, probably in his fifties, with white hair swept back from his forehead, and wearing a suit of very expensive cut and materials. The collar of the suit, and the white shirt beneath, were round, in the style that she thought was called ‘Nehru’. A pendant hung around his neck, looking more like a piece of technology than ornamentation. His eyes were brown, and seemed devoid of any malice or anger – although that didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t a threat. His hands were laid rigidly on the arms of the chair. Ahead of her a huge LCD TV screen hung on the wall.
She quickly scanned her body for injuries, wounds, bandages – anything that might have indicated she had been shot. Nothing. Whatever that weapon had been it hadn’t even left her with a headache, let alone anything that needed medical treatment. Intriguing.
The man gestured, rather clumsily Bex thought, towards an open door to his left. Strangely, she thought she heard a high-pitched whine, like a nearby mosquito, as he moved. ‘If you wish to leave then you can leave,’ he said. ‘You are on an island a few miles off the Indian coast. There is a jetty about ten minutes’ walk away, downhill. A boat is waiting there that will take you back to Mumbai. Nothing will obstruct you.’
Bex raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t going to enter into conversation with him if she could help it: all interrogations started with the interrogator attempting to engage in discussion with their victim. Once the talking started then it was only a matter of time before something was given away.
‘My name is Agni Patel,’ the man said, lowering his arm, again very deliberately and slowly. ‘You won’t have heard of me. You can look me up on the Internet if you wish, but you won’t find very much information other than the fact that I have patented several designs for quantum computing chips that use room-temperature superconducting to keep themselves cool. That is how I made my money.’
Agni Patel. The sniper – Emma Sprue – had mentioned that name. She’d said that the man who had turned up to the meeting with Fahim Mahmoud had worked for someone called Agni Patel, and that Patel was some kind of telecommunications billionaire. Well, so far Sprue’s information had turned out to be accurate. Bex wasn’t sure how much of a help that might be, but it was a start.
The thought started a whole cascade of thoughts in her head about methods of checking Patel out, all of which ended with the ARCC kit and Kieron. She casually raised her hand up to her face, brushing a lock of hair from in front of her eyes while checking whether she was wearing the glasses. She wasn’t. When she scratched her ear, she couldn’t feel the earpiece. Damn!
She glanced at the door. What were the chances that Patel was telling the truth? Could she actually just walk out of there unhindered and get a boat back to Mumbai? What would happen if she tried?
‘You are wondering two things,’ Patel said calmly. ‘The first is: am I telling the truth about you being able to walk out of here whenever you want? The proof, as you English say, is in the pudding. It’s a misunderstood phrase, by the way. One is not proving that the pudding is actually a pudding; the word “proof” used to mean “test”, so one is testing the pudding to check that it is edible, by eating it. It is the same sense of the word as is used when we talk about “proofing” weapons.’ He waved a hand as if brushing away a fly – and again it was a clumsy motion, and she could hear the whining sound. ‘My apologies – one of the problems about having a lot of money and being surrounded by people who work for you is that nobody ever says, “You talk too much, old man. Shut up.”’
He left the sentence hanging. Bex knew he was waiting to see if she took the bait and actually said: ‘You talk too much, old man; shut up.’ That would have initiated a discussion, which was what he wanted, so she said nothing.
‘My point being,’ he went on eventually, ‘that if you want to leave, leave. Take the boat to the port. If you then decide you want to come back and find out the answer to the second question in your mind, then you can. That question, by the way, is: what is it that I actually want of you? Why are you here?’
Again, he left a gap for her to ask the question. She just smiled at him.
‘There is a third question which will occur to you at some stage, but has not yet. That question is: what kind of weapon did my people use that left no injuries and incapacitated you so quickly at long range – not like that rather clumsy anaesthetic spray my people found in your shoulder bag. The answers to those last two questions are connected, by the way, and they also relate to my name.’
He was wrong about that. Thoughts about that strange weapon had already occurred to her.
Patel raised his left hand from the arm of the chair. He held what she thought at first was a mobile phone, but which she quickly realised was a remote-control unit. He pressed a button, and he began to stand up from the chair, supporting himself with his right hand on the chair’s arm. It wasn’t the chair lifting him up, Bex saw: it was a lightweight metal structure, like an exoskeleton, into which his body had been strapped. Each joint had a small motor arrangement on it. On his chest and arms the exoskeleton had been hidden by his suit jacket – which, she now saw, was draped over a body that seemed thinner than she had previously thought. On his legs it was over the suit trousers but it had been hidden by the way he had been sitting in the bulky chair.
Standing, Patel pressed a series of buttons, and the exoskeleton walked him over to the window. He stopped and stared out.
‘“Agni”,’ he said, ‘is the ancient Hindu fire god. He is usually depicted as being red-skinned, with three legs, seven arms, and two faces. I’ve always thought it a pity, by the way, that your Christian god is invisible and unknowable. Hindu gods are so much more … theatrical.’ He pressed a button, and his head turned to face her. ‘At least say something, my dear, just so I know you’re mentally aware and alert.’
‘I’m not a Christian,’ she said. She probably couldn’t go forever without saying anything, and she was beginning to think that Patel might not be a threat – or, at least, not as much of a threat as Blood and Soil appeared to be.
‘That’s OK.’ He smiled, and at least he could do that without a machine. ‘I’m not a Hindu. Or at least not a practising one. I do appreciate the theatricality though. Hindu gods are more like strange alien creatures than supernatural beings, I’ve always thought.’
‘Illness, or injury?’ Bex asked, indicating the exoskeleton.
‘Illness,’ he said. Pressing a single button caused the exoskeleton to turn him so that he was facing her – probably a pre-programmed instruction, often used. He had the light behind him now, meaning that his face was in shadow. It was a tactically advantageous position: it made it much harder for her to read his expression like that. Maybe it was accidental, but she doubted it. Bex had already decided that nothing this man did was accidental. ‘I was, for many years, involved in helping my country develop nuclear weapons,’ he went on. ‘It’s difficult for a country to get taken seriously in a political or military sense unless they have nuclear weapons, and any country that does have nuclear weapons tries their best to stop anyone else from getting them. The nuclear “club” is very exclusive.’ He smiled, but there was little humour in the expression. ‘Ironically, we Indians found the same thing when you British were running our country and setting up your own social clubs: we weren’t allowed in except as waiters, maids or cooks. History has an unfortunate habit of repeating itself at different scales and in different ways.’
Nuclear weapons. The casual use of the phrase chilled Bex. This was the connection with the Pakistani official selling Pakistan’s nuclear secrets, but what did it all mean?
‘Go on,’ she said calmly.
‘In March 1992 I was part of a secret Indian military mission to Russia’s Sosnovyi Bor nuclear facility. We were looking at making a deal with them to use some of their reprocessing technology.’ He paused. The memory was obviously difficult. ‘An accident occurred. Radioactive iodine leaked into the atmosphere from a ruptured pipe. I became exposed, along with several of my colleagues. I breathed it in. It burned, so much.’ A brief expression flickered across his face: regret and sadness combined. ‘Most of my colleagues are dead now. I am still alive, but at a cost. A literal and physical cost – it takes a lot of money to keep the sickness at bay and allow me to move.’
Bex couldn’t help herself. And, she thought, provocation was a good interrogation technique, and it did seem that she was now interrogating him rather than the other way around. ‘And yet that doesn’t stop you playing around with neutron bombs. Surely when a child gets burned it stops playing with fire?’
He nodded: a weak movement, unaided by electronics or mechanics. ‘One of the benefits of having money is that you can collect things. Some billionaires collect expensive sports cars; some collect sports teams; I collect weapons of mass destruction.’
‘I think I’ve seen this film,’ Bex said. ‘It doesn’t end well.’
‘I’m not some supervillain hell-bent on blackmailing the world,’ Patel said. He seemed offended. ‘I collect them so I can destroy them.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. There are too many nuclear weapons in the world. Current estimates put the number at around fifteen thousand. Do you know how many it would take to render the world uninhabitable?’
Bex opened her mouth to answer, but Patel kept talking.
‘A hundred. Only one hundred. A regional war of a hundred nuclear detonations would produce five billion kilograms of dust and debris that would rise up to the Earth’s stratosphere and block sunlight. This would produce a sudden drop in global temperatures that could last longer than twenty-five years and temporarily destroy much of the Earth’s protective ozone layer. This could also cause as much as an eighty per cent increase in UV radiation on the Earth’s surface and destroy both land- and sea-based ecosystems, potentially leading to global nuclear famine. And we could do that a hundred and fifty times over, with the number of weapons we have stored away in remote bunkers.’
‘Once would be enough.’ Bex shivered. ‘Agni – the Hindu god of fire.’
‘Indeed. Most of these weapons are held by America and Russia, of course, but some are orphans, left over from failed military regimes, while some have been stolen by, or even are being built by, terrorists. And as the world’s governments have shown no real will to get to grips with the problem, a small group of wealthy individuals have decided to step in. We take the weapons – or steal them, if we have to – and we store them safely and securely, under heavy guard, while we develop the technology to disassemble them and sequester the nuclear fuel somewhere. One of my billionaire friends – you’d recognise the name if I mentioned it – thinks we should build rockets to fire the fuel into the sun where it would burn up without trace. Another thinks we should inject it into the molten core of the planet. Either option would require more money than any government has, but not more money than we have.’
‘Very altruistic,’ Bex conceded.
‘You’re making fun of me, but I am sincere. And then, of course, there are the biological weapons – mutated versions of smallpox, cholera or anthrax, not to mention diseases that have never existed in nature but which have been created in a laboratory purely to kill people. Although they have been outlawed by the Biological Weapons Convention, they are still being worked on by many countries, and nobody knows how many biological weapons currently exist. I collect those as well – collect them and destroy them.’
