now, trying hard to detach his anger from his trigger finger. “Do as I say or I will shoot you.”
“Go ahead. Shoot me,” Dr Sauvage snapped back. “Then NJ7 will never know what France is capable of.”
“Then turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
“So you can march me back to London? Back to NJ7? Back to your wife?”
At that, Coates slapped his hand viciously across the old man’s face. The blow sent him straight to the floor.
“Hollingdale can do nothing without me,” barked Dr Sauvage, spitting blood. “Tell him that! And tell him this: the day he finds out what I’ve done will be the day it kills him.”
Ian Coates approached slowly, leading with his gun. But Dr Sauvage crawled backwards, round his desk, and stopped at the foot of a huge bookcase. The two men stayed like that for what seemed like for ever. Dr Sauvage’s blood dripped from Ian Coates’s knuckles. Then the doctor’s glance flicked for a moment towards the papers on his desk. Coates followed his gaze, but immediately regretted it. In that instant, Sauvage heaved on the bookcase.
“No!” cried Ian Coates, dropping his gun and lunging forwards. He was too late. The huge books hit Sauvage like a prizefighter’s punches. Then the bookcase itself crushed his wiry frame.
Coates was stunned. Only the doctor’s head was visible. Coates reached down to the man’s neck and felt for a pulse – out of habit, not in hope. A cloud of dust settled on the body.
Coates didn’t panic. He rifled through the stacks of papers on the desk. Everything was in code, of course, but he discarded the files at the top as obvious decoys. He paused when he came to a bright orange flash drive, the sort you could simply plug into a computer to make vast amounts of data portable. It was marked simply ‘ZAF-1’. The same initials recurred on documents, sometimes in bold. It meant nothing to him.
He snatched up his gun and stuffed as many of the files as he could under his arm, slipped the flash drive into his pocket. He ran out of the room and followed the staircase to the roof. From there he bounded across to the next building, shoving the papers into his coat so his hands were free. ZAF-1, he thought, trying to shut out the image of the doctor’s death. What could it mean?
He leapt to a balcony below, then down again, catching the arc of a lamp-post. Finally, he let himself drop into the back alley and away he ran.
“ALL RISE!” EVERYBODY in the courtroom obeyed the sombre instruction except two bowed figures.
“This isn’t fair!” shouted Olivia Muzbeke, her voice thin with fear and fatigue. Her husband tried to move a hand across to comfort her, but his wrists were chained to a metal bar in front of him. A guard dragged them both to their feet.
The stern-faced judge eased himself into his chair. “This is as fair as it gets for bad citizens,” he mumbled.
Neil Muzbeke looked across the courtroom to where the jury used to sit, in the days when a jury was still part of the legal system. Inside, he felt as empty as those benches. He was past shouting. He had given everything. He had protested, he had pleaded and now he was resigned to whatever fate the judge had been told to pass down to them. Any other thoughts were eclipsed by the image of the son he might never see again.
“You knew that the dangerous criminal, Jimmy Coates, was a fugitive from the authorities,” the judge intoned, “yet you shielded him and then helped him to escape, putting the life of Prime Minister Ares Hollingdale at risk. Not only that, but your own son…” he scoured his notes for the name, “…Felix Muzbeke, even at the age of eleven, has shown himself to be an enemy to the Neo-democratic State of Britain.”
The judge wheezed and adjusted his glasses. Then, without even looking up, he passed sentence.
“Incarceration,” he announced. “At the discretion of the Home Office.” He slammed down his hammer to make the decision final. That noise killed any lingering faith Neil Muzbeke had had in his country’s justice system.
At the back of the courtroom stood a woman who seemed too attractive for such miserable proceedings. But she was satisfied with the result of the trial and the speed at which it had been conducted.
“Release the news,” she whispered to a young man in a black suit, who trembled at the woman’s complete authority. “Make sure it reaches France.”
“Yes, Miss Bennett.”
Jimmy was hardly conscious of the thud as the helicopter touched ground. The oleopneumatic shock absorbers of the EC975 were designed for the smoothest of landings. What woke him was the change in the noise of the rotors. The steady drone that had surrounded them since they left London was dying now.
Jimmy shook off his nightmare. As always, he had no recollection of what he had been dreaming, only shortness of breath and a thumping heart – the remnants of his terror. He pulled his blanket tighter round him. What did he have to be afraid of? In the past fortnight he’d crashed through brick walls, breathed underwater and caught a bullet in his hand. Even stabbing a knife into his wrist had done no serious damage. The bloodless slit would heal abnormally fast. The bandage (which his mother had wound too tight) was unnecessary, but it was a comfort to him now. Nevertheless, he feared what might be out there waiting for him.
NJ7, Britain’s most secret intelligence agency, could be anywhere. Their scientists had designed Jimmy to be an assassin when he reached eighteen then sent him to kill seven years too soon. As soon as Jimmy had disobeyed that order, struggling against his physiological destiny, he had become an enemy. And there could be no less desirable opponent than NJ7.
Perhaps even more than that, Jimmy feared what was inside him. He felt so human, but now he knew that part of him was an inhuman power, created to kill.
Everyone else in the cabin was asleep. Christopher Viggo stepped out of the pilot’s seat and stretched, his lithe physique outlined beneath the creases in his shirt. He turned to meet Jimmy’s gaze, gave a tired nod then stalked away. That was the man NJ7 had sent Jimmy to eliminate.
Viggo was fighting to make Britain a democracy again. Under the unlikely cover of running a Turkish restaurant, he had been building an organisation that might one day be able to oppose the Government. It had taken all of Jimmy’s mental strength to reject his first mission and join Viggo’s cause.
Now they had landed, the others quickly woke up. The wind whipped around them as they alighted from the helicopter. Jimmy could almost taste the countryside air, so different from the city they had escaped. They were in the middle of a field and the only building between them and the horizon was an ancient, half-timbered farmhouse, with its upper floor projecting out over the lower one.
So this is what France looks like, Jimmy thought to himself. He had never been out of Britain before. He had never even wondered what it was like anywhere else. Now he realised how strange that was. Perhaps he had always assumed everywhere else would be just like home. Anyway, he was too tired and scared to feel excited about finally being abroad. Besides, he wasn’t on holiday. He was on the run.
Yannick Ertegun, the chef from Viggo’s restaurant in London,
