Sure Fire

Jade was out of bed and grabbing back the duvet. Rich let it go and went for her pillow instead. They faced one another, each brandishing bedding.

“Peace?” Rich suggested.

“If you give me my pillow back.”

“Fair enough.” He threw it to her.

Jade dropped the duvet and caught the pillow. Then she started hitting Rich with it, driving him back on to his bed.

“Hey, hey, hey!” He tried to fend her off.

“That’s for ganging up on me.”

“We’re not – I wasn’t. When?”

“In the kitchen. Getting a Chinese.”

“Yeah, as opposed to what?” Rich wanted to know. “There’s no food in this house. Just beer, champagne and cigarettes. Which did you want for dinner? At least now we’ve been and got some milk.”

Jade flopped down on her bed, dragging the duvet back up over herself. “I’m sorry. It’s all just so… sudden. So unfair.”

She started crying again. Rich sat beside her on the bed.

“It is a nightmare,” Rich agreed. He looked over at the bedroom door. “He’s a nightmare. Maybe boarding school will be better.”

“Oh, look,” Jade said, sniffing between her tears. “Out the window.”

The curtains were drawn and Rich frowned. “What?”

“Thought I saw a flying pig,” Jade said.

“Maybe you did,” Rich told her. He grabbed his pyjamas from under his pillow and headed for the bathroom.

In Krejikistan, the cut glass of a chandelier glittered as the light reflected off its facets. Electric bulbs had replaced the candles that once provided the light, but the ceiling above it still retained an original mural – a pale blue sky with delicate clouds drifting across.

The room below was enormous, with a floor made up of black-and-white marble squares. The space was made to seem even bigger by large mirrors that hung on the walls. The furniture – a highly-polished wooden table that had been made for Louis XIV of France, high-backed chairs patterned in gold leaf that had been a gift to a tsar, and a series of seventeenth-century side tables – were almost lost in the huge space.

Viktor Vishinsky sat in one of the antique chairs. In front of him was a single place setting for dinner – heavy silver cutlery, an ornate bowl filled with stuffed olives and a glass of white wine. He was looking intently at a large screen that his technicians had set up at the other end of the table. The image was grainy and unclear.

“Is that the best you can do?” he asked. He took one of the olives from the bowl in front of him and rolled it between his finger and thumb.

“We have enhanced it as much as possible,” Pavlov, the chief technician, assured him.

Vishinsky settled back in his chair and let them explain. To him, the images still looked crude and fuzzy. He pushed the olive into his mouth.

“You can see where the man at the back of the laboratory is opening the canister,” Pavlov said. He froze the image. It was projected from a laptop computer on to the large screen. The hi-tech set-up looked out of place in the tsarist splendour of the huge room.

Two other technicians were standing nervously at the side of the room. Whether they were there in case Pavlov needed their own specialist expertise, or simply to give him moral support, Vishinsky did not know or care. His whole attention was focused on the speckled images on the screen.

Pavlov used a laser pointer and ran the red dot of light round the figure just visible by the shadowy shape of the canisters. “If we had images from an infra-red camera—” he began.

But Vishinsky cut him off. “We do not. We must work with what we have. What can you tell me, apart from the obvious?”

Pavlov let the video run on. “As you can see, just, he is reaching inside the canister. As his hand comes out – there.” He froze the video again and indicated the man’s hand with the pointer. “He is holding something. Something which we must assume he dipped into the fluid and filled. It is not very big. We can tell from his hand that it is about the size of an eggcup.” Pavlov paused for a moment, before adding, “It is not an eggcup, I should point out.”

“I said omit the obvious. Is it something he found in the lab?” Vishinsky asked, taking another olive. “Or is it something he brought with him?”

“We can find no indication that any container of that size was in the lab. Unfortunately, there is nothing left of the lab, so it is impossible to be sure if anything was taken. But earlier in the sequence we see the man looking round, we think for a container. He finds nothing useful, so uses whatever he brought with him. See, here…” He wound the footage back at high speed before letting it play again. “He seems to take something from his pocket.”

“Something that he had in his pocket,” Vishinsky said.

“He may have come prepared, and then looked to see if there was a more suitable or larger container to be found in the lab.”

“But there was not.”

Pavlov nodded. “All sterile glassware. Fragile, if you have to make a hurried escape.”

The video was running forward again as they spoke, at normal speed.

“There!” Vishinsky said suddenly. He leaned forward. “Go back – slowly.”

Pavlov let the images play backwards at a tenth of their normal speed. He froze the playback as soon as Vishinsky said: “Stop it there.”

Vishinsky got up from his chair and walked slowly along the length of the table. His eyes never left the screen. The image showed the dark figure as his hand emerged from his pocket. The fingers were wrapped round whatever he was holding – the receptacle he was about to fill with liquid from the canister. In that single frozen frame, it was angled so that it caught what little light there was – perhaps a faint glow from the display of nearby equipment.

Vishinsky stood close to the screen. “Close in on his hand, on the thing he is holding.”

Pavlov moved his fingers carefully across the laptop’s track pad and the image zoomed in on the container in the man’s hand.

Just barely visible was a shadow or a mark. Something on the container that was catching the light. “What is that?”

“I’m not sure.” Pavlov tried to trace the mark with his pointer, but it was not distinct enough. “A maker’s mark perhaps? Maybe it’s just a shadow, a reflection – an artefact of the enhancement process.”

Vishinsky nodded. “Find out,” he said.

“But, sir,” Pavlov said, “we have already enhanced the image as much as we can. Any more and we risk introducing things that are not actually there.” He hesitated and licked his dry lips.

“Don’t trouble me with details,” Vishinsky said. “Just find out what that mark is. You can do that, can’t you? For me?”

He raised a grey-white eyebrow as if asking a simple favour of a friend.

Pavlov swallowed. “Of course, sir. We’ll do what we can. But—”

“Find out!” Vishinsky roared. He waved his hand in sudden, abrupt dismissal and Pavlov quickly disconnected his laptop and hurried after his colleagues from the room. “And tell someone to bring me my food,” Vishinsky said. “Before it gets cold.”

3 (#uce0d6ac3-0244-5c0c-ab32-ac2fda8807cb)

The sound of a telephone woke Rich in the middle of the night. Instinctively, he fumbled for his mobile, but it wasn’t the same ring. He and Jade both had mobiles, though Mum had made them pay for their own top-ups. Probably he was out of credit anyway.