YEARS PREVIOUSLY…
Twelve black dots crept through the night sky. They were only visible because the North Sea was relatively calm that night and the lights of the oil rig reflected off the water. In the wind, the night manager’s tie blustered round his beard. He pulled his suit jacket tighter, but it was too small to cross over the front of his considerable stomach.
“Are they…?” he gasped. His words were lost beneath the constant pounding of the rig’s machinery.
“I think they’re helicopters, sir!” shouted a burly man next to him. “Do you know anything about this?”
The night manager shook his head and just caught his hard hat before it slipped off. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the horizon and the twelve silhouettes, moving like a pack of airborne panthers through the clouds. His mouth gaped in horror.
“Pack your belongings!” he yelled. “Tell everyone!”
“What?”
“They’re coming here! Don’t you see?” The night manager grabbed his colleague by the collar of his fluorescent work jacket. “I thought we’d be safe. I didn’t believe they would actually ever do it! But they’re coming!”
With that, he turned and ran as hard as he could back to his office, panting heavily. By the time he reached the office door, twelve helicopters were hovering over the rig. Their drone was as powerful as the thrashing noise of the rig. The night manager watched, a crunching panic in his heart.
From each chopper dropped twelve ropes, making the sky a grid of black lines. Then down each rope slid a black figure. The curve of each man’s back was interrupted by the solid horizontal line of his machine gun. The night manager collapsed against his office door.
Seconds later, a giant man loomed over him. He hitched his machine gun behind his back, pulled off his balaclava and held out a hand. His face looked like a veil of skin had been stretched over a construction of iron scaffolding.
“Get up!” he ordered. “I’m the commanding officer of this SAS unit. This oil rig is now the property of the British Government and temporarily under my supervision. Instruct your staff that you will all be leaving at 07:00, when a new workforce will arrive to take over.”
At last the night manager gathered the strength to slap the soldier’s hand away.
“You can’t do this!” he screamed. “This rig is owned by a private company! You’re stealing it!”
“I’m nationalising it.”
“Is that what the Government calls stealing now?”
The soldier dug his heel into the night manager’s beard and pushed him all the way to the floor. “So call the police,” he grunted.
He stepped over the night manager into the office, looking down his nose at the shelves of exotic ornaments that had obviously been collected from all over the world. He ran his finger along the edge of a checked board, covered in an arrangement of shiny black and white stones.
“Don’t touch that!” the night manager pleaded, sitting up against the door. “Please! I’m in the middle of a game.”
“A game? Looks like a bunch of stones to me.”
“Yes, yes, but it’s a Padukp’an board. An ancient Chinese game.”
“Paduk-what?”
“Padukp’an.” The night manager was panting even harder now and constantly wiping sweat from his face. The soldier thought for a moment, then announced,
“I like this. I’m keeping it.”
“What?” the night manager squealed. “You can’t! It’s mine!”
The soldier took a seat behind the desk. “The rig is the British Government’s,” he declared, “and that game is now mine.”
“But you don’t even know how to play!”
“I’ll teach myself,” said the SAS man. “Now get out of my office.”
When you know the British Secret Service wants you dead, it’s hard to relax. But Jimmy Coates was forcing himself to try. Every second that passed, every mile he was driven away from New York, it became a tiny bit easier. No hand burst through the window of the car to grab him. No sirens pierced the quiet drone of the road. He had really done it. He had fooled NJ7, the top-secret British intelligence agency. They thought he was dead.
According to NJ7 files, Jimmy Coates—the boy their scientists had genetically designed to grow into a killer—had been terminated by machine-gun fire and his body lost in New York’s East River. They could call off the search. Jimmy didn’t want to let himself smile. Not yet. He wasn’t far enough away.
“Welcome to Blackfoot Airbase,” announced Agent Froy, the CIA man who had grasped Jimmy by the shoulder to lift him out of the East River a few hours before.
The black sedan slowed down and Froy pulled into a driveway. The iron gate in front of them rolled back automatically. Jimmy sat up in his seat to look for whatever device must have identified the car. His eyes scanned the foliage that lined the road. The hedge wasn’t a hedge; he noticed that immediately. It was an iron wall, six metres high and at least a metre thick, constructed to resemble a line of Leyland cypress trees and painted dark green.
In a second, Jimmy picked out four security cameras and a laser scanner all concealed in the fake hedge. A cockroach couldn’t get into this place without being microwaved by the lasers first.
He twisted in his seat as they drove through and watched the gate slide back into place. The last sliver of the rest of the world disappeared. He was cut off from everything, sealed inside Blackfoot, the classified military airbase on the outskirts of Piscataway, New Jersey.
Jimmy’s family was a lifetime away. He had left his sister Georgie and his best friend Felix Muzbeke with Felix’s parents back in New York. They were also in the care of the CIA. Jimmy could see them now, in the safehouse apartment above a Korean restaurant in Chinatown. He didn’t know when the CIA would relocate them, but he hoped it would be soon.
Meanwhile, his mother had been on her way to find Christopher Viggo, the former NJ7 agent who had helped Jimmy escape Britain. Viggo had run off back to Britain, full of anger. Jimmy pictured him trying to overthrow the Government single-handed.
He had to hold on to the hope that he would see them all again. Even if it wasn’t for several years, whatever happened or however he changed, Jimmy knew he must always remember his family.
But Jimmy had no idea how he would change. Inside him was a powerful organic programming. It enabled him to do amazing things, but day by day the assassin instincts in his DNA took over more of his mind, subduing his human voice. Would that voice become just an echo in his memory? And what if his memory itself was pushed aside to make room for the assassin’s skill?
For a horrible minute, Jimmy imagined himself in a few
