wind and the burning metal blasting into him at the same time. He desperately tried to keep his eyes open, searching for Bligh and Froy. They’re going to die, he told himself. In his panic, he thought he saw them falling through the debris, one with a parachute on his back but unconscious, the other completely helpless.
Neptune’s Shadow! Jimmy heard Bligh’s last words in his ears over and over again, above the din of the air rushing past him as he hurtled down through the atmosphere.
The noise was matched by the turmoil in Jimmy’s head. I could have saved them, he thought. Why did I hesitate? Why did I take his parachute?
Parachute…The word seemed to reawaken Jimmy’s programming. It would never forgot its first priority—to stay alive. While his mind was in chaos, his hands moved calmly and expertly to the ripcord. Even while he wanted to scream, free-falling through the carnage, he could hear a quiet voice in his head counting to ten. Then he felt his arm go tense and suddenly everything changed.
It felt as if his whole body was jerked upwards. The parachute burst open above him. The roar of the wind in his ears changed to the sound of a breeze. Bits of the plane still dropped around him, but soon he was far above them, floating down towards the sea.
Mitchell Glenthorne stalked through Terminal One of New York’s JFK airport, limping slightly. His shoulders were broad for a thirteen-year-old, but they were hunched over, masking the size and strength in his chest. His face was fixed in a scowl. The inside of his head was nothing but a jumble of silent curses. He was passing the time by running through a list of all the people he wished he could have it out with. It took in most of the people he had ever met, starting with his brother Lenny and his parents.
He thought of Lenny, lying on a slab somewhere in London, being kept alive by NJ7 for experimental purposes. Serves him right, he thought. Mitchell’s parents’ only fault had been to die in a car crash when he was a baby, but now he had reason to doubt these family relationships.
Jimmy Coates, the renegade assassin—the dead renegade assassin, Mitchell corrected in his head—had claimed before he was shot that Mitchell and Jimmy were half-brothers. If that were true, where did that leave Mitchell’s parents and Lenny?
Now wasn’t the time to work it out, so instead he snorted at how ridiculous the idea was. He blocked out the thought that his whole existence was ridiculous. From his appearance, no one would have believed that he was the first 38 per cent human, organic assassin. Or that he’d been called on to enter active service five years before he was due to be fully operational.
He held the image of Jimmy’s face in his imagination a second longer, as if out of some kind of respect for the dead. Actually, it was to give Jimmy a double dose of cursing. Jimmy was the one who had given Mitchell this limp. He’d be walking normally again in no time, but still, every faltering stride gave him another reason to sneer at the memory of Jimmy Coates.
The airport terminal was busy as usual and, as usual, it was saturated with security personnel. Hardly even thinking about it, Mitchell noted their positions and sightlines as he passed each one. After he had made his move, he would have to escape the building. These armed men and women would be in his way.
Next on the list of people he was fed up with was Miss Bennett. She was technically his boss, but always seemed to act like a sarcastic schoolteacher towards him. Instead of praising him for his part in the termination of Jimmy Coates, she had immediately dispatched him to continue his ongoing mission to find and kill Zafi. She hadn’t even given him time for his knee to heal.
And that brought him to Zafi. Mitchell took up a position overlooking the Air France check-in desks, lying in wait for his target. Zafi was the organic assassin designed and built by the French Secret Service twelve years before. That made her almost two years younger than Mitchell, but so far Mitchell had to admit that her speed and ingenuity had got the better of him. But that wasn’t even what he minded the most about her. He could have respected Zafi if she’d acted with the discipline and seriousness that Mitchell always tried to bring to his job. But she never did.
Agency computers had flagged up a last-minute reservation on a transatlantic flight, under the name ‘Michelle Glenthorne’. Mitchell knew that Zafi was taunting him by booking herself a flight in that name. He clenched his fists. As soon as Zafi dared to turn up, no matter what disguise she tried, Mitchell was ready to rip her head off. That’s how annoyed he felt.
Zafi peeked through the curtain of the fitting room of the Ferragamo outlet. The clothes were too fancy for her tastes and they didn’t make anything in her size, but that wasn’t why she was here. As soon as she saw Mitchell she gave a light giggle. She laughed again when she noticed how annoyed he looked, and how hard he was studying the faces of everybody who went anywhere near the Air France check-in desks.
She slipped out of the fitting room and took a pink pashmina scarf to the till. Without looking up, the middle-aged woman behind the desk asked, “How will you pay?”
“Charge it to the Stovorsky account,” Zafi instructed confidently.
The woman shuddered slightly and her eyes jumped to her customer’s face. Zafi pouted. “Of course,” said the woman, nervously fingering the gold chains round her neck. She lifted the coin tray in the till and pulled out a selection of half a dozen airline tickets. Her hands were trembling as she fanned them on the desk.
“Get them out of sight,” Zafi snapped.
The woman gasped and shoved her hands back in the till.
“Is this Icelandic wool?” Zafi asked loudly, feeling the pashmina between her thumb and fingers. The woman took another corner of the scarf and felt it the same way.
“It’s the finest quality,” she announced.
“But too expensive for me,” Zafi replied and swept out of the shop. In her hand was the ticket that the woman had passed her under the scarf. It was a small charter flight, destination: Reykjavik, Iceland. The passenger name was ‘Glenthornia Mitchell’.
Colonel Keays was shaped like a box and his chest was a tapestry of medals, with ribbons in every different colour against the dark blue material of his uniform. He stood tall and proud, with his chin slightly raised and his cap under his arm. The stark light of the room reflected off the parts of his head where the hair was at its thinnest.
He looked over the three people standing in front of him and for a long time there was silence. Georgie and Felix stood on either side of Georgie’s mum, shifting from foot to foot. Helen Coates herself seemed completely relaxed, staring straight back at Keays.
A small team of CIA agents had brought them deep into the basement of Sak’s Fifth Avenue Department Store. But the ornate interior of the shop floor was a world away. They had found themselves surrounded by the stormy grey of completely bare concrete walls, facing the US Director of Intelligence, while three other agents waited outside.
For no apparent reason, Keays snorted a short laugh, though he wasn’t smiling. “I’m glad we found you first,” he announced. “The streets were still crawling with NJ7 agents when my men picked you up. But don’t worry; this is America. Miss Bennett knows she can’t do anything here unless I give her the OK.”
“You know Miss Bennett?” Felix blurted.
“Of course. Intelligence agencies all over the world have to talk to each other, don’t we? Especially countries like Britain and America. Countries that used to be close.” He paused and looked at them hard. “It’s a shame we’re not so close any more.”
“A shame for who?”