‘Sheep,’ Sam observed morosely. ‘Just sheep, moving from one pen to another, unaware that they’ll eventually be walking into the slaughterhouse.’

  ‘Ooh, deep,’ Kieron said.

  ‘You can laugh, but I’ll never be one of them. I’ll never have a steady nine-to-five job sitting at a desk. I want to get out and see things. I want to make an impact.’

  Kieron peered over the edge of the balcony. ‘If you jump now, I’d say you’d make a pretty big impact.’

  ‘Funny. At least you’ve got a career in MI6 to look forward to, if you play your cards right. What have I got? My mum wants me to get an apprenticeship in a garage. Imagine me with a spanner.’

  Prompted by Sam’s mention of MI6, Kieron reached up and pressed the connect button on the ARCC glasses. It was probably the twentieth time he’d tried it. The first ten times he’d just got that same view of the carpet in the Mumbai hotel. The next nine times the glasses had been dark. Maybe the battery had died; maybe the glasses had shut down automatically to conserve power. Or maybe someone had picked them up and put them in a box.

  ‘Nothing?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ If possible, Kieron’s mood slipped even lower. He knew that Bex must be in trouble, but she was thousands of miles away and he couldn’t help. She’d have to get out of this situation, whatever it happened to be, herself, and find the glasses again if she wanted to get back in touch. And the trouble was, he had so much to tell her about getting Bradley back from Blood and Soil and discovering that this meeting between them and probably their MI6 contact was taking place at Newcastle station.

  Thinking of Bradley diverted Kieron into wondering how he was getting on. ‘Have you heard anything from Courtney?’ he asked Sam.

  ‘Just that she’s cooked Bradley a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs and mushrooms, and he’s wolfed it all down.’

  ‘Sounds like he’s better.’

  ‘Kind of, but she’s worried about his eyes. Apparently he’s still got blurred vision. She thinks it might just sort itself out, but she’s keeping an eye on it.’ He sniggered. ‘As it were.’

  Kieron let his gaze scan across the crowd, looking for anyone with the distinctive blond hair of the Blood and Soil thugs. So far, nothing. The morning crowd was comprised largely of commuters heading from the trains into the city with a mixture of shoppers doing the same. Later, in the evening, he knew the tide would turn, with the commuters and shoppers heading home, and then turn again when people came into the city for an evening out at the cinema, the theatre, a bar or a restaurant.

  He looked beyond the crowd, past the barriers and as far as he could into the area where the trains arrived and left: unloading their human cargoes and then loading up again before pulling out. No sign of anyone who might be coming in for a meeting with Blood and Soil, although he had a feeling that whoever turned up would be wearing a neutral suit and tie, just like the majority of the commuters. Nondescript. Anonymous.

  He glanced up at the destination boards that rippled with orange dots as the display changed: Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow were all north-east of the city; York, Leicester and London were all south. As far as he was concerned they were all magical places on a par with Narnia or Hogwarts. He had no idea what they were like, but he longed to visit them, even to live there. They had to be better than Newcastle, surely.

  It seemed that Sam was having the same thoughts. ‘We should move to London some time,’ he said. ‘When we’re older, like. We could share a flat, get jobs doing bar work, maybe make some money streaming gaming sessions on YouTube when we’re not at work. We’d need money from the bar work to get the latest games – nobody wants to see a streaming session dedicated to something that came out seven months ago but which we just got for our birthdays. That’s old news.’

  ‘People livestream classic games,’ Kieron pointed out.

  ‘Yeah, but a game has to be at least twenty years old before it becomes a classic.’

  ‘I don’t think that –’

  ‘Wait. Look.’ Sam indicated with a nod of his head a position near an expensive juice bar. ‘Isn’t that the two blokes who beat up Bradley?’

  Kieron looked casually in that direction and reached up to press a virtual button on the display of the ARCC glasses, making it look as if he was waving at someone down near the ticket office. The glasses obligingly took a still photograph of the area he’d been looking at and displayed it in a corner of his vision. Looking away now, so he didn’t arouse their suspicions by staring directly at them, Kieron examined the photograph.

  ‘It certainly looks like them,’ he said.

  The two men were scanning the crowd with ill-disguised impatience. If, as Kieron suspected, the person they were waiting for was an expert intelligence operative, then these two were untrained morons. They radiated suspicion.

  ‘Can you see who they’re waiting for?’ Kieron asked.

  Sam shook his head. ‘No, but it’s interesting how a clear space opens up around them. Either people are subconsciously scared of getting too close, or they haven’t had a bath for a while.’

  ‘Actually, that van did whiff a bit,’ Kieron observed.

  The two Blood and Soil thugs were looking at everyone who went past, scowling. Usually Newcastle station saw people looking and dressing like them only on a Saturday and only when the local team were playing at home.

  A person suddenly diverted from the crowd and walked up to them. It was a boy: young – younger than Kieron or Sam. He handed one of the thugs an envelope before vanishing again as fast as he could.

  The thug ripped the envelope open and pulled out a sheet of paper. He looked at it, then showed it to his companion.

  ‘Maybe they can’t read,’ Sam muttered. ‘We could go down and offer to help.’

  ‘They’ve seen us, remember? They’ll recognise us.’

  ‘Only me,’ Sam responded. ‘You could go.’

  The two thugs conferred for a moment, then started to walk off.

  ‘The meeting’s off,’ Sam said darkly. ‘We’ve wasted our time.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Kieron stepped back, so that he wasn’t visible from the concourse, and accessed a set of the virtual menu options by waving his hands and making pressing gestures. He called up a screen showing a recording of the momentary handover, then highlighted the figure of the young boy with an arrow. He then instructed the recording to scroll backwards, but always keeping the arrow over the head of the boy.

  ‘Are you conducting Mozart?’ Sam asked. ‘It’s Mozart, isn’t it?’

  ‘Just because Mozart is the only composer you’ve heard of,’ Kieron murmured, ‘you don’t need to bring him out any time you want to make a classical music reference.’

  ‘I’ve heard of Beethoven too,’ Sam said defensively. ‘Metallica worked with him on a video. It’s on YouTube.’

  ‘I don’t think they actually worked with him.’ Kieron watched as the video played in reverse, people walking backwards with assurance, not bumping into each other. ‘He died before anyone in Metallica was born.’ The arrow pointing to the kid’s head moved across the concourse in a weaving line, finishing up on the far side near the ticket barriers. There the kid met with a woman wearing smart casual clothes – jacket, slacks and a silk blouse. He handed her the envelope and a five-pound note, and they split up.

  Kieron set the video to play normally, and watched as the well-dressed woman stopped the boy as he walked past her, said something and pointed towards where the two thugs were standing. He nodded, and she gave him the envelope and a five-pound note. He smiled, nodded, and set off across the concourse again.

  ‘The meeting’s been moved, I think,’ he said to Sam. ‘There’s a woman there who sent that kid over with the envelope. I think she’s told them to go somewhere else and wait for her. She’s probably looking to see if they were followed.’

  ‘Maybe she’s just cancelled the meeting.’

  ‘Then why travel all this way just to have the envelope handed to them? No, it has to be a change of location.’

  ‘We should follow them,’ Sam said, pushing himself away from the railings.

  ‘No,’ Kieron said. ‘She’s going to be looking for someone following them, and if she sees us then the meeting is off. We have to follow her.’

  He watched the woman as she watched the two thugs go. Her gaze swept across the station, looking for anyone else who seemed to be heading in the same direction, then she started walking away, towards a different exit.

  ‘Quick,’ he said; ‘down the escalators and head left at the bottom.’

  He’d made a mental note of the colour of the woman’s jacket – black – and her silk blouse – turquoise. Once he and Sam got to the bottom of the escalators he glanced around, trying to locate her. She was just leaving through an arched exit. He grabbed hold of Sam’s shirt and dragged his friend in that direction.

  While they were moving, Kieron quickly accessed the ARCC glasses, trying to get them to identify the woman, but all that happened was that a red box appeared with the text: ‘Identity Restricted: Refer to Supervisor’. That, he thought, wasn’t much help, except that it did indicate she might be something to do with MI6.

  The woman crossed the brick-tiled area outside the station and turned right, heading along Neville Street. She walked fast, and both Kieron and Sam had to almost run to keep up. She crossed under the dual carriageway and then turned right on Milk Market. Every now and then she paused to look in a shop window or gaze into the massive glass frontage of an office block. Kieron assumed she was checking to see if she was being followed, but probably more out of habit than anything else. She had no reason to believe that she’d been spotted at the station. And besides, even if she saw Kieron and Sam, who would suspect two greeb kids?

  ‘Heading for the Quayside Market?’ Sam asked breathlessly.

  ‘More likely the Millennium Bridge,’ Kieron replied.

  She was indeed heading for the Gateshead Millennium Bridge: the structure of arched white metal that curved from the Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Quayside to the Gateshead Quay arts quarter across the glittering blue waters of the Tyne. People still referred to it as ‘the new bridge’, although it had been built before Kieron was born. They also called it ‘that hideous eyesore’, but he rather liked its tilted, asymmetrical charm.

  The bridge was down, which meant they could follow the woman around the curve of its length to the other side. There she turned left and strode down Shore Road, along the bank of the Tyne.

  ‘Unless she’s heading for a hotel,’ Kieron said, ‘I think she’s going to the Baltic Centre.’

  The woman was, indeed, heading for the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, as the ARCC glasses insisted on telling Kieron. He waved away the box of information that tried to inform him that the Baltic Centre had originally been built in the 1950s as a flour mill and a store for animal feed before being converted into an arts centre in 2002. Fascinating but useless information, Kieron thought as he pushed it away, although he did find himself wondering how many arts centres had been converted from flour mills. Not that many, he suspected.

  The woman headed straight for the blocky yellow-and-red brick building. Posters outside the main glass doors advertised an exhibition of artwork by someone Kieron had never heard of.

  Once inside, the two boys found themselves in a large hall whose walls were painted entirely in white, with a floor made from narrow wooden planks. Stairs and lifts led up to other levels, and the space was filled with artworks made out of metal shapes that seemed to melt and flow into differently coloured blocks of ceramic without any obvious boundary or join. Kieron felt as if he wanted to spend more time looking, but not right now. They had work to do.

  ‘There’s a couple of restaurants in here,’ Sam muttered. ‘If she goes to one of them for this meeting then we’re screwed. We’d stand out like a mouse in a loaf of bread, and besides, I haven’t got any money.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Kieron replied. He’d just seen the two Blood and Soil thugs. They were standing over by a particular sculpture and looking at it in bemusement. The woman was heading their way but via a circuitous route that took her past several other sculptures. Kieron suspected she wasn’t so much appreciating the art as looking for anyone following her, or them.

  ‘Like you said, they’ve seen you up close, in the industrial unit,’ he murmured to Sam. ‘You can’t get too close. Let me do this.’

  Reluctantly, Sam held back as Kieron moved towards the point where the woman was walking up to the two thugs. A group of young people stood nearby, staring at another sculpture while a teacher tried to get them to tell him how it made them feel. Fortunately they were sixth formers, all dressed in their own clothes rather than a school uniform. Kieron latched on to the outskirts of the group in a position where he could stare past the sculpture at the meeting. He zoomed a window on his ARCC glasses in to focus on the thugs, and suddenly noticed an option on the menu that said: ‘Highly Directional Microphone’. He activated it with a flick of his fingers, and suddenly the din of voices in the huge exhibition hall faded, and he was listening to the two men as if he were standing beside them.

  ‘I dunno much about art,’ one of them said as the woman joined them, ‘but the welding is crap.’

  ‘I’m not used to being summoned,’ the woman interrupted. ‘Especially north of Watford. This had better be good.’

  ‘How do we know who you are?’ one of the blond thugs – the one named Kyle Renner who had tried to find Kieron and Sam in the shopping mall – said belligerently.

  ‘Because you asked me to be here, and I’m here. Who else would I be?’

  ‘All right – how do you know we’re who we say we are?’

  ‘Because I’ve got files on both of you, with photographs and everything. I’d be tempted to say I know more about you than your mothers do, but they’ve changed your nappies and I haven’t, which means there are some things only they know about. So – don’t waste any more of my time than you have to. Tell me what’s so important.’

  ‘You need to know that someone’s been interfering with our operations,’ Renner said. ‘When we took that bloke from the shopping centre, he dropped those glasses and earpiece you wanted. I went back for them, but someone else had picked them up. I was told it was a couple of kids, so I didn’t worry too much – I just reckoned I could pick the kit up later from the nearest second-hand electricals place, but then something happened.’ He scowled, making his face look like some kind of fright mask, and looked away. ‘These two kids somehow found out where we were holding that bloke, and they rescued him.’

  ‘They rescued him,’ the woman repeated. It wasn’t a question, as far as Kieron could tell; it was her attempt to come to terms with the stupidity of their actions. ‘A couple of kids. This is what I get for working with idiots.’

  ‘Oi,’ the second man said. Kieron quickly accessed the ARCC equipment and asked it to identify him. It came back: David Allen Crisp. British citizen; aged twenty-five. Convictions for theft. Linked to right-wing group Blood and Soil. ‘You don’t get to talk to us like that!’

  ‘Not only do I talk to you any way I want, I also tell Darius Trethewey how incompetent you are. If you ever want to amount to anything in Blood and Soil then you need your boss on your side, and he’s a very good friend of mine.’ She thought for a moment. ‘All right, I suppose the fact that you’ve told me what’s happened counts in your favour. You could have pretended that everything was OK. Do what you can – I need that man and those kids found.’

  ‘And hidden away until you can talk to them,’ Renner said.

  ‘And killed, I think. I was hoping not to go that far, but needs must when the devil drives. Kill all three of them and dispose of the bodies.’ She sniffed. ‘Of course, this is Newcastle. You could probably leave them out in the street and nobody would notice.’ She glanced at Renner. ‘Do not leave them in the street. Understand?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  The second thug, Crisp, thrust his chin forward aggressively. ‘The plan’s still goin’ ahead, yeah? You ain’t goin’ to stop it?’

  The woman looked at him as if she’d just found him on the sole of her shoe. ‘You don’t know anything about the plan. You’re too stupid. And by that I mean you’re too stupid to understand it, but you’re also too stupid to be told, because you’d blab to people in the pub when you get drunk, and that would be the end of the plan.’

  Crisp looked like he was about to hit her. The woman just stared him down. Eventually Renner took Crisp’s arm and said, ‘Just go over to the window and watch the boats for a while. Go on.’

  Crisp left, still fuming. When he moved out of earshot, the woman said, ‘That man is a liability. Get rid of him. If you don’t, I’ll tell Trethewey to get rid of both of you.’

  ‘No need for threats.’ Renner lifted his head momentarily, acknowledging her point. ‘I’d already worked out that he’s a security risk. I asked Darius for permission to deal with him. Give it a day and he won’t be a problem for anyone apart from those blokes who get paid to keep the canal clear of rubbish.’

  The woman stared at Renner as if she was evaluating him for the first time. ‘You’re a lot cleverer than you look, and than he actually is. How much do you know?’

  ‘About the plan?’ Renner paused for a moment, and looked around. ‘Some things that you don’t. For instance, I heard from one of our sisters out in India. She’s part of the team trying to get hold of the fifth device. She said someone tried to interfere with their operation. It was the girl, the one whose partner we took prisoner.’

 

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