Someone she’d worked with once had told her that, when he was searching hotel rooms of suspected foreign agents, he would deliberately pull a couple of hairs off his own head and stick them on a couple of drawers and suitcases. It had been his idea of a joke; something to confuse the foreign agents. If they had been foreign agents. She hadn’t been sure whether to believe him or not. After a while, she’d noticed that he wasn’t around any more. Maybe he’d played too many jokes. Or finally played one on the wrong person.

  Thinking of her dad, and the old movies they’d enjoyed together when she was a kid, had triggered a feeling of sadness inside her. She knew she ought to dismiss it, push it away so she could concentrate on what she was doing, but just for a moment she gave in and thought about her dad, and where he was now. The man who had once been tall and reassuring, with arms that could wrap around her and squeeze all her fears away, was now a shrunken shell of his former self. The staff at the home where he was being looked after were marvellous, but every time she went to see him it took him longer to remember her name. One day he wouldn’t remember at all, and that would break her heart. Her mother had died years ago, of a sudden heart attack. That had devastated both Bex and her father at the time, but now her father had forgotten all about it and Bex had come to the conclusion that her mother had been the fortunate one.

  She glanced at her watch. Time to go on the hunt.

  She’d already decided that it was pointless going back to the Jain temple and searching it for clues. The two briefcase thieves would have cleared out long ago, and they wouldn’t have left anything behind. They had struck her as professionals: they wouldn’t have dropped anything. No convenient maps or notes that would help her track them down. They might even have set fire to the temple, just to cover their tracks completely, although she hoped not. The Jain monks deserved better than that for their gentle hospitality.

  The sniper on the roof of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel was another matter. They had vanished quickly after they had taken their shots. Snipers had their own tradecraft, just like undercover agents. They always collected up the spent shell casings ejected from their rifles, just in case there were any incriminating fingerprints or DNA evidence on them. The problem for this particular sniper was that they had been resting their rifle on the edge of the roof, and with a bit of luck one of the casings might have fallen over the edge. The sniper certainly wouldn’t have gone down immediately to collect it – that would have been stupid. The chances were that they would hope it had been lost, and not worth the risk to come back for it later – but thanks to the recording Bex knew roughly where it would have fallen. If she could find one then maybe – maybe – there might be some evidence on it that would enable her to identify the sniper. It was a long shot – she smiled at the pun – but it might just work.

  Grabbing a camera for disguise and the ARCC glasses, Bex left her room and set out on her quest.

  Her hotel was just a short walk away from the Taj Mahal Palace. Her muscles were still protesting, but she tried not to let it affect the way she walked. Still pretending to be just a tourist, she cast curious glances at a park as she passed its locked gates, and at an impressively large building that had obviously been built in the days when India had been a part of the British Empire but which was now apparently a museum. She had been right about the heat: it was as if all the paving stones and old buildings had absorbed the heat of the day, like a battery storing up electrical charge, and were now radiating it back into the air. The odour of spices and frying meat fought for attention with the smell of the flowers that filled the park.

  Bex crossed an intersection where five roads came together and the traffic seemed to be treating the lights as decoration rather than instruction. Bex approached the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. Ignoring the impressive entrance, she diverted around the side of the building. There, at the back of the hotel, was the open space where she had seen the briefcase stolen earlier that day. Ferries were still letting passengers off and taking them on. To one side a small group of musicians with drums and sitars were playing for the tourists.

  Bex moved through the crowd – more sparse than it had been previously but still large – to the place where she had been standing earlier, when Kieron had alerted her to the presence of the sniper. Picturing the images that the ARCC equipment had recorded and Kieron had played back to her, she turned and gazed at the impressive facade of the hotel. Yes, if the sniper had been up there, then any falling cartridge cases might well have bounced off the ledge there and fallen … yes, there, in a cluster of bushes with glossy green leaves and white flowers.

  She moved closer, camera raised as if she was taking photographs of the flowers. She scanned the soil beneath the bushes. No sign of the casing there. She glanced left and right, but still couldn’t see anything. Maybe a leaf had been knocked off one of the bushes by the heavy rain, or some passing tourist, and had fallen onto it, hiding it. Maybe the rain had churned the soil up enough that the casing had sunk into the mud. Maybe it just wasn’t there at all, and she was looking in completely the wrong place.

  A little way away, a tourist took a photograph of her husband standing in front of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. The camera’s flash illuminated the hotel’s impressive architecture in stark white light, and Bex suddenly saw a metallic glint beside the stem of one of the bushes. It’s just a coin, she thought, or a key, or something normal, but she moved closer to it just in case. Bending down and picking it up would look suspicious, so she fumbled with her camera as if trying to remove the memory card that held the photographs, and deliberately dropped it.

  ‘Oh, stupid!’ she said, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear, and bent down. Her fingers brushed against the glinting metal object half buried in the mud, and she carefully picked it up, holding it by its bottom rim so that she didn’t cover up any fingerprints that might be there, as she grabbed at the camera’s strap with her other hand.

  ‘Is it OK?’ the woman who had taken the photograph of her husband called.

  ‘I think it’s fine!’ Bex called back. ‘Thanks!’

  She pretended to examine it, but really she was looking at the thing she had picked out of the mud.

  A gleaming brass cartridge case with burnt markings around the crimped hole where the bullet had been held, and a dimpled mark on the flat end where the firing pin had struck it.

  Perfect.

  Deliberately fumbling to get the camera strap around her neck, she slipped the cartridge case into her pocket. She could worry about how to organise the DNA and fingerprint analysis later; at least she’d got it.

  She hung around for a few more minutes, taking photographs of the illuminated Gateway of India, before heading back to her hotel.

  Halfway back, she realised she was being followed.

  It started as a prickle on the back of her neck, her subconscious telling her that it had spotted someone dawdling a little too long, or staring at her a little too hard. Agents were trained not to ignore feelings like that: the brain often knew things that it didn’t know it knew, and it had ways of trying to alert you.

  Bex stopped by the gates to the park and pulled the camera strap over her neck. Holding the camera up, she took a photograph of the museum, but as she brought the camera down to her side she deliberately pointed the lens behind her and took another photograph, timing it so that the flash activated at the same time as another group of passing tourists took a whole series of selfies. She set off again, towards her hotel, raising her camera up obviously as she walked so that she could apparently check on the screen how the photograph of the museum had come out, but actually examining the image of the street behind her.

  A woman stood about twenty feet away. Not aware that she was being photographed, she was staring directly at Bex, and frowning.

  The image of the sniper that the ARCC equipment had recorded had been blurred, but Bex felt pretty sure this was the same person.

  It was obvious now what had happened. The sniper had returned to look for the missing casing, and she had seen Bex take it. Now she was following Bex – either to retrieve the casing or to find out why Bex wanted it. Or perhaps both.

  Bex wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, she’d found the sniper – and with less trouble than she had expected. On the other hand, the sniper had also found her.

  She had to find a way to turn the situation to her advantage.

  She started walking again, still feeling that prickle at the back of her neck. Her hotel was only a few minutes’ walk away. She had to decide what to do quickly, and then put the plan into immediate action.

  Bex felt a fluttering in her stomach. She wasn’t used to this kind of thing. Her work was usually either long-distance or close-up but undercover. She’d been trained in what to do if someone realised she was undercover, of course – close-up fighting – and that was what had got her through the chase in the Jain temple. This was different. This was her being followed and planning on taking out her follower. Not permanently, but long enough to restrain and question her.

  Fluttery feeling or not, when she entered her hotel lobby she walked straight up to the desk.

  ‘I’m in room two oh eight,’ she said to the clerk: a small Indian girl in a sari and heavy make-up. She spoke loudly enough that the woman following her, who had come in and was standing by the door looking at her watch, pretending that she was meeting someone who was late, could hear her. ‘I want to complain. The people in the room opposite mine were making a lot of noise last night. Could you maybe ask them to keep quiet?’

  The girl quickly typed something into her computer, then looked up with a frown. ‘The room opposite you is empty at the moment,’ she said apologetically. ‘Perhaps it was above you?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Bex said. ‘I could be mistaken.’

  ‘If it happens again, please let us know and we’ll find out who it is.’

  Bex smiled. ‘Thank you. I’d appreciate it.’

  Turning away and heading for the lifts, she suppressed a satisfied smile. She’d been fairly sure the room wasn’t occupied – the maids hadn’t been in, as far as she could tell – but it was worth checking.

  When the lift doors opened the corridor was, fortunately, deserted. She sprinted down to her door, then turned to the room opposite instead. Fortunately the hotel was old-fashioned – deliberately so – with metal keys for the rooms attached to big fobs instead of key cards. That made it easier. She slipped a small but efficient crowbar out of her purse, slid it between the door and the jamb and gave it a quick pull. The lock splintered. She pushed the door open and entered the darkened room, then closed the door again. If the door had been secured electronically, with a key card rather than a key lock, she’d have had to think of something else because the electronic lock would have alerted the desk that someone had opened the door of a room that was supposed to be empty.

  She pressed up against the door and put her eye to the little peephole. It gave her a fish-eye view of her own door.

  Bex waited.

  It was probably twenty minutes later that she heard the door to the stairs at the end of the corridor open. The sniper hadn’t used the lift. That was clever – lifts were clunky and slow. And, of course, difficult to fight in. Bex remembered one film in particular she’d watched with her dad where two men had tried to have a fight in a lift. It hadn’t been easy.

  A minute went by, then a dark shape appeared in her field of view. Someone wearing a hoodie and a cap, with the hood pulled up over the cap. It was a woman – the sniper. She looked both ways down the corridor, then took something from her pocket. Probably something that would get her through the door quickly, before Bex could react – except Bex wasn’t in the room.

  The sniper bought her hand up to face-level, and Bex saw that she’d been wrong. It was an atomiser – a spray bottle with an aerosol button on top. It almost certainly sprayed an instant anaesthetic. She was going to knock on the door, probably say she was from housekeeping – no, more likely she was checking on the room noise that Bex had reported! – and when Bex opened the door she would spray the anaesthetic into Bex’s face.

  If Bex had been there.

  Just as the thoughts were passing through Bex’s mind, the sniper raised her left hand to knock on the door.

  This was the moment.

  Bex pulled open her own door and said, in a flustered voice, ‘Oh, I’m sorry – I didn’t see you there!’ Even as she said the words she moved out into the corridor. The hooded sniper turned her head in a reflex action but, caught halfway between attacking and stopping the attack, she momentarily froze. In that split-second Bex grabbed the hand with the spray, turned it towards the sniper’s face and pushed the woman’s finger down on the button.

  A cloud of mist enveloped the sniper’s face. Bex held her breath, and kept her finger on the button. The sniper tried to bring her right hand around to hit Bex, or push her away, but already her legs were buckling. Bex caught her before she fell. The spray can dropped to the ground. Bex fumbled in her pocket for her massive key fob, then opened the door with her right hand while her left arm supported the now-unconscious woman. When the door opened Bex pushed it in, kicked the spray can in, carried the sniper inside then pushed the door shut with her foot.

  Five seconds, max. She was proud of herself. Her trainers would have been pleased.

  She dumped the sniper on the bed, aware of a smell that reminded her of hospitals, dissipating in the room’s air-conditioning.

  Bex glanced around the room, looking for something with which she could tie the woman up. She was painfully aware that, had events gone a slightly different way, the sniper might now be doing exactly the same thing, but hey! That was life.

  Her gaze fixed on the two lamps, one on each side of the bed, and the electrical flex that ran from them to the unsafe-looking plugs that were half hanging off the wall, but then she remembered the Ethernet cables in the desk drawer. She pulled them out quickly and tied the sniper’s ankles together, then turned her over and tied her wrists together before turning her back. The sniper’s breathing was heavy, and Bex hadn’t heard any changes that made her think she might be waking up. The woman was a professional: she wouldn’t use an anaesthetic spray that wore off in a couple of minutes.

  The sniper wasn’t secured to the bed, but Bex had the anaesthetic spray. That should be enough to stop the woman from struggling.

  She checked her watch quickly. Two o’clock in the morning, so, nine thirty at night in England. Teenagers being teenagers, Kieron was probably still awake, and she needed his help. She pressed the small button on the side of her glasses that activated a visual alarm in the ARCC glasses and a repeated ping in the earpiece.

  A few moments later, Kieron said, ‘Oh, hi!’ He sounded flustered. ‘I thought you didn’t want to talk until tomorrow.’

  Bex thought she heard an engine revving in the background. ‘Sorry – are you driving?’

  ‘No. Well, yes. Sam is.’

  ‘Sam can drive?’

  ‘Of course Sam can drive!’ Kieron sounded offended on his friend’s behalf.

  ‘No, I mean: is Sam allowed to drive?’

  A long silence was interrupted by Kieron saying, casually, ‘So, what’s up with you then?’

  She sighed. ‘Long story short, I’ve found the sniper.’ She glanced at the bed so that Kieron could see.

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ A pause. ‘And what are you going to do – torture her for information?’

  Bex felt offended. ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘OK – you want me to locate a pharmacy in Mumbai that can sell you a truth drug.’ A moment’s pause. ‘Apparently scopolamine is recommended, but it’s tricky to use.’

  ‘No, not that.’ She sighed again. ‘Actually, I haven’t really thought this through. It all went pear-shaped a bit quickly. Can you suggest something? And by that I mean something that doesn’t involve pain.’ She had to swallow, to get rid of a lump in her throat. ‘I don’t think I could do that.’

  ‘Let me think.’ Bex heard Kieron mutter something to Sam. The next thing she heard was a squeal of brakes.

  ‘Are you two all right?’

  ‘We’re fine.’ Another pause. ‘Actually, I think I’ve got something. Give me a high-definition of that woman’s face.’

  Bex moved in closer and pulled the sniper’s hoodie down. She made sure she didn’t put her hand anywhere near the woman’s mouth, just in case she was faking and decided to take a sudden bite. Best to be sure.

  ‘Right, hold still for a sec. Yes, the ARCC system has identified her. Apparently she’s in the MI6 database. Her name is Emma Sprue, and … oh, she’s a freelance assassin responsible for around twenty known assassinations. You know, we’re in the wrong business. Based on what she charges, she’s seriously rich.’

  ‘That’s lovely for her,’ Bex said. She thought she could see a quiver in the sniper’s right eyelid. ‘I hope she’s got a good pension plan as well. How does that help us, apart from motivating us with jealousy as well as loyalty to the Crown?’

  ‘Actually,’ Kieron said, ‘I’ve got an idea …’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A cold wind blew off the River Tyne, bringing with it a complex and nasty smell that seemed to blend dead fish, industrial effluent and rotting vegetation into some toxic mix that made Kieron’s nose itch. He turned his collar up against the chill and tried to ignore the smell. It was hard, but then this was Newcastle and he was an emo teen. Everything was hard.

  Why couldn’t he live somewhere interesting, like New York or London?

  Why couldn’t his mum and dad still be together?

  He’d read something once where a person said, ‘If wishes were fishes then we’d all have a feast!’ He supposed that was a way of saying that everyone wished for lots of things all the time. He’d also read somewhere that if you wanted something badly enough, and worked hard enough, then you’d get it. But life had taught him that sayings like that were just sayings, designed to make people feel slightly better. They weren’t actually true.

 

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