The lights didn’t matter now, and he needed to keep track of his pursuers. What he saw surprised him. They were pulling back. When Jimmy looked up, he realised why. Only a few hundred metres ahead, the track went into a tunnel. Jimmy was hurtling directly towards the side of a hill.
Pull up, he pleaded with himself. But his body flicked away his fear. Please, he begged, battling his own instincts. His body wasn’t responding. The ground loomed towards him. Was this part of his programming, he wondered. Perhaps he was destined to destroy himself to avoid capture.
The world seemed to slow down around him. Every clump of mud in the hillside was cast into sharp relief by the floodlights behind. The sharp outline of his own helicopter’s shadow grew rougher and rougher, larger and larger. There was nowhere to go. Above and around him was a net of military firepower controlled by NJ7. Ahead of him was solid earth, with no way through.
Through, Jimmy thought. Of course. At last he realised what his programming was planning. With split-second timing, Jimmy’s hands heaved on the controls. The helicopter slowed momentarily, darted sideways, then charged along the track, directly behind the train.
Jimmy plunged into the tunnel, but the rotors of the chopper were too wide. They snapped off with a powerful crunch and shattered in every direction. Jimmy knew he had no control now. All he could hear was the piercing screech of his runners scraping along the track. In the fountain of sparks, Jimmy saw that the nose of his cabin was pressing against the back of the train.
This was only half the plan. For the rest, he had to move faster than he ever had before. He swung himself out of his seat and around the side of the helicopter. The metal casing was burning hot to the touch, but he wasn’t holding it long enough to care. The friction of the tracks was slowing the chopper, while the train powered ahead. Before a gap could open up between them, Jimmy flung himself forwards, pouring all of his strength into stretching for a safe landing.
The back of the train seemed to jump up and smack him in the face. The impact knocked all the wind from his chest. The tips of his fingers caught a metal rim of some part of the carriage, but he couldn’t even see what he was clinging on to. Somehow he managed to claw his way round to the side of the train for a firmer grip and closed his eyes against the rush of wind and dust in his face.
The train burst out of the tunnel with the body of the chopper bouncing behind it. Jimmy opened his eyes to see that the whole airborne fleet was there waiting for him. Within a second, the sky was lit up with the blast of rockets. Jimmy gasped and clenched every muscle. He couldn’t believe it—NJ7 were actually going to blow up a train full of innocent passengers just to kill him.
But they weren’t. Instead, the rockets slammed into the broken and battered helicopter he’d just left. The rotorless body of the chopper erupted into a huge ball of flame. It tumbled along the track, spitting fire and debris in a huge circle around it.
Jimmy rattled on towards London, untouched.
The Cavendish Hotel on London’s Jermyn Street offered five-star accommodation from a past era. It was one of the city’s oldest remaining independent hotels, but everybody knew it wouldn’t survive for long. Hardly any tourists were allowed into the country these days, and there was no reason for British people to come and stay, even if they could afford it. That left only wealthy foreign businessmen, and most of them had better taste than to stay within the Cavendish’s sprawling corridors, with its peeling paintwork and lights dim enough to hide the stains on the walls.
More importantly to Zafi Sauvage, the service was erratic. For example, the management team didn’t care enough to ask each other about her—the pretty twelve-year-old girl who had recently appeared on the cleaning staff. As long as her uniform was tidy and she appeared busy with something, successive managers each assumed she was on work-experience for somebody else. It was an assumption Zafi nurtured through artful manipulation.
She even had the head concierge believing that she was sixteen, and the daughter of a foreign investor, on an undercover fact-finding mission. It was far-fetched but just about believable. Perhaps more so than the truth. Who would have believed that she was a genetically designed assassin working for the DGSE—the French Secret Service?
Zafi set about polishing the handrail on the main staircase, while she peeked down at the clock in the lobby. It was 4.50 a.m. In ten minutes she knew there would be a shift change and she knew exactly which team would be starting work. Memorising the rota had been one of the first steps in her assimilation on to the staff.
She left the gold of the handrail gleaming and trotted back up to the landing, where a service door took her into the Cavendish’s behind-the-scenes labyrinth. The twisting passages and spiral staircases of the ancient building were the perfect place to vanish.
This was just the first stage of Zafi’s disappearing act. From here, the whole world could become her labyrinth. Travel documents were easy to come by and easy to copy. Entire false identities could be created while inattentive receptionists took coffee breaks. The kitchens were a bountiful source of supplies and, thanks to the many empty bedrooms, she was well rested. The only question was where to go. Could she ever return to France? Her last mission for the DGSE had gone perfectly until the final moments. Instead of killing her targets, she’d helped them escape.
Zafi pattered through the corridors of the hotel, trying to picture the scenes back in Paris. Did her Secret Service bosses know yet that her targets were still alive? Could they possibly suspect that she’d failed on purpose? She was overcome by a rush of desperation. Would she ever get the chance to prove to them that she could be effective?
Her step was so light on the floorboards that there was hardly a creak. She made it to a storeroom of long-forgotten lost property and snatched up her jacket and a shoulder bag she’d packed full of essentials. In the pocket of her uniform she could feel the outline of her mobile phone, heavy on her skin. She knew the DGSE must have been trying to get in touch, but she didn’t dare check her messages.
Zafi slipped out of a fire escape into the back alley behind the hotel. Her timing was perfect. A rubbish truck rumbled into view at the end of the alley. The silhouettes of two burly refuse collectors lumbered towards the back door of the hotel. Zafi skipped past the pile of black plastic sacks and kept to the shadows. She easily slipped past the men without being noticed.
When she reached the truck, she pulled out her phone. It would be so easy to toss it away forever. Her old life would be over—crushed in the back of a rubbish truck. The DGSE would try to track her down, but they’d never find her. She was too good for that. She would let them assume she’d been killed in action by the British.
Her fist squeezed the phone so tightly it almost cracked the plastic casing. But she didn’t throw it. Her arm refused to move. She could feel her breath growing short and her limbs tightening. In seconds the rubbish men would be back and her chance would be gone. What was stopping her?
She glanced at the display on her phone. One new message. Her imagination dreaded what it might say. She’d failed to complete her mission. They could be recalling her to Paris to receive some kind of punishment. Or perhaps they were already laying a trap for her. Had she turned from France’s greatest weapon to an embarrassment, or even an enemy? Zafi gritted her teeth and told herself not to be so dramatic. It was just a mission, she thought. But without a mission, I’m nothing. In the corner of her eye she could see the rubbish collectors coming back, their backs laden with plastic sacks. Zafi pulled in a deep breath. I’m an assassin, she told herself. I can handle it. She delicately tapped the buttons on her phone and read the message.
As usual, it was in the form of an encrypted stream of letters and numbers. Zafi relished the warm hum in her brain, allowing
