he would never catch up at this rate. With a delicate twist of his knee, he turned into the road, ducked low and caught the back of a passing car.
The exhaust fumes made his head swim and the car behind honked furiously. Jimmy didn’t care. He steadily moved hand over hand towards the front of the car, even while it was shifting through the traffic. Jimmy kept his eyes firmly on the back of the van, four or five vehicles ahead. He rode every bump in the street’s surface like a snowboarder across ice, keeping his head below the level of the car windows.
The traffic picked up speed now, but even at fifty or sixty kilometres per hour, Jimmy managed to push himself off the front of the first car and catch the back of the next. Again, he clawed his way forwards, until he was close enough to see the face of the front seat passenger in the wing mirror. After only a couple of minutes, the van turned into a side road. Jimmy gently guided himself in the same direction, letting go of the car and taking back control of his own navigation. He ignored that meek inner voice telling him he had no idea what he was expecting to do or find.
It was a fairly quiet street, with large housing estates on either side of the road. Jimmy hung back. There was no other traffic to hide behind now. About a hundred and fifty metres down the road the van turned off into a driveway. Jimmy lost sight of it and had to hurry forwards. He was just in time see the van disappearing down a ramp into the underground car park beneath a residential tower block.
Then the shadows were lit up by a flash. A loud crack followed almost immediately. Jimmy shuddered. Was that a gunshot? He jumped off his makeshift skateboard and ran down the street. The noise of the world seemed to drop away—the traffic on surrounding streets, the shouts of children in the playground between the estates, a TV game show blaring out from an open window in the tower block itself. All Jimmy could hear was the echo of that single gunshot mixing with his feet pounding the pavement.
Just as Jimmy reached the ramp leading down to the car park he was nearly knocked off his feet. From under the tower block came a moped, roaring into street. The driver’s face was covered by a black helmet, but Jimmy recognised the blue overalls. It was the van driver, speeding off up the street.
Jimmy froze. He looked back down the ramp. A solid metal shutter was dropping into place to seal the car park. He turned to look up the street. The moped had disappeared. Jimmy felt a surge of warmth in his legs. They unlocked and thrust Jimmy forwards—but not after the moped. Instead, he dashed down the short slope and dropped into a roll to slip underneath the metal shutter just before it reached the ground.
His programming was telling him one thing: that underneath this building there were crates of nitroglycerin hidden in the back of a van. And somebody had just been shot. Jimmy didn’t know why, and he didn’t know how he’d stumbled on all of this, but there was no way he could leave it alone.
Of course, Jimmy also had no way of knowing that NJ7 had hoped he would find the van. The driver had followed his instructions to circle Waterloo Station and attract attention with obviously suspicious movements. NJ7 had struck lucky. They might not have been able to find Jimmy, but they’d done the next best thing. They’d drawn him in and trapped him in Walnut Tree Walk.
The metal shutter slammed down on to the concrete, cutting off the last sliver of daylight and sealing Jimmy in the car park. Strip lights cast soft shadows around the rows of cars, lined up between huge supporting pillars. Jimmy stood up and dusted himself off, but the first thing he saw made him feel like his knees would give way.
Next to the entrance was the security attendant’s booth. A cup of tea was perched on the ledge inside, still steaming. But the only thing left of the attendant was an explosion of blood and brains on the back wall.
Jimmy staggered back from the booth, clutching at his mouth and nose, as if he could block out the stench of fresh blood. After a second his insides swirled with the force of his programming. It gushed up through his body, blasting away the shock, but it was too late to stop Jimmy retching up the measly contents of his stomach.
Suddenly, the curiosity that had brought him here took on a fierce urgency. While a part of him wanted to curl up in the corner and catch his breath, he knew that wasn’t an option. Instead, Jimmy found the guard’s phone and walkie-talkie. Both had been smashed—presumably by the same man who had blasted the attendant’s head off.
He drove past me on that moped, Jimmy realised, the sickness rising up inside him again. I could have stopped him. He felt dizzy, but his programming seemed to crank up a gear. It was like a belt fastening a notch tighter inside his skin, pulling his thoughts into calm, emotionless order.
First he found the van. That wasn’t hard—it was parked in the central row, right next to one of the pillars. The rear doors were locked, but Jimmy jabbed his elbow into the catch. There was nothing he could do to help the attendant now, but if he was right about the van containing explosives he had to warn somebody.
He pulled the van doors open and saw that the vehicle was completely full of crates, stacked up three high and covered in a thick grey blanket. When he pulled back the corner of the blanket, he nearly threw up again at what he saw. There were dozens of crates and every single one was packed with slim glass tubes of a clear, jelly-like substance, all connected by a network of black wires. The whole van was one giant bomb.
Jimmy wanted to warn people. He thought of all the residents in the tower above him, of the children in the playground alongside the building. They all had to evacuate. But Jimmy’s feet wouldn’t run. Instead he remained rooted to the spot while his eyes darted around the contraption in front of him. He traced the lines of wire like he was following the map of a labyrinth, examining the piles, counting precious seconds. How long did he have before it blew up?
Come on, Jimmy told himself, feeling the sweat crawling down his neck. There’s no way you can defuse a bomb. There was no ticking clock, no red digits showing him a countdown. There certainly wasn’t anything that looked like an off switch, and all the wires were the same colour—black. Then he noticed the condensation on the glass tubes.
Of course, he thought. Nitro freezes at thirteen degrees. The chemical was usually a liquid, but Jimmy realised it had been cooled into a solid to make it easier to transport. At the same time, he knew that as nitroglycerin thawed, it became even more unstable.
The piles of crates in front of him seemed to change shape. In Jimmy’s imagination, some of them even became transparent. He could see exactly how this bomb was supposed to work.
To his horror, he felt a rush of pleasure. Something inside him was impressed by the artful construction of the bomb—thrilled even. It was built in such a way that it required only a single detonator. That would shoot a charge through the wires, setting off a chain reaction as it raised the temperature of each tube of nitroglycerin to melt them in a specific order. That delicately arranged chain reaction would multiply the size of the explosion a hundred times.
The beauty of it was that the bomb was virtually sabotage-proof. The detonator was nowhere to be seen —presumably hidden at the very centre of the pile of crates. Jimmy noticed tiny gold rings round the connections between the wires and the glass tubes. A second trigger mechanism, he realised. Any attempt to disconnect the wires or get to the detonator would set off the chain reaction early. That left no way of stopping it, and no way of predicting when it would explode, even with the expertise of an assassin inside him. Jimmy knew this bomb could blow up at any moment.
He ran back and heaved on the metal shutter at
