Jimmy Coates: Target

“Ah,” exclaimed Dr Sauvage with a dry smile. “Congratulations. A father for the second time!”

Ian Coates was scowling 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.

CHAPTER ONE – UNO STOVORSKY (#ulink_5b0fc3ab-3972-5ad5-b92e-abdf832c5141)

“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, led the way. Jimmy walked with his mother, Helen, followed by the dark and beautiful Saffron Walden, who was Viggo’s girlfriend and a vital part of his outfit in her own right. Jimmy’s older sister Georgie followed with her friend Eva, and Jimmy’s best friend Felix Muzbeke stumbled after them, his face scrunched up against the elements.

Viggo hung back from the rest of the group. As they walked through an orchard at the back of the farmhouse, he stopped to fill his arms with fallen branches. Already the internal struggle in Jimmy began again: the agent in him realised he should help Viggo to camouflage the helicopter, but the temptation of food and warmth kept him following the others towards the house. He held himself rigidly in line. Control meant everything.

At the farmhouse door was a tiny woman, who looked like the oldest person Jimmy had ever seen. Yannick bent down to kiss her on the cheek and she clipped him round the back of the head.

“Everybody, this is my mother,” grinned the chef.

Jimmy smiled cautiously at the woman, who scowled as they all shuffled awkwardly into the building. Clearly, she hadn’t been expecting visitors. Despite being large, the interior of the farmhouse was dark and austere. The ceiling dipped at unusual angles as if the central beam were reaching for the fire that dominated the room. It didn’t seem to be doing much to heat the house, thought Jimmy, shivering.

A staircase lurched upwards out of the corner and there was a door at each end of the room. Yannick’s mother trudged through one of them, revealing a glimpse of a large, old-fashioned kitchen. Yannick followed her, pleading and explaining as best he could without being indiscreet.

Soon they were all sitting round the fire with giant mugs of hot chocolate.

“When will we start looking for my parents?” Felix whispered in Jimmy’s ear. Jimmy stared deliberately into the flagstones and shrugged. He had almost forgotten that Neil and Olivia Muzbeke had been arrested for helping him escape NJ7. He had been completely caught up in his own thoughts. He silently scolded himself for being so self-obsessed. Even at that moment, he could feel the ever-growing presence of his powers, deepening the split between his heart and his instincts, his mind and his body. He could control his powers for now, but only by succumbing to them. It scared him beyond anything he had ever felt before to think that he might be relinquishing his humanity.

Whenever Jimmy did think back, he could only relive the last time he had seen his own father. Jimmy could picture in alarming detail Ian Coates’s face as he refused to escape from the British Government with Jimmy. The split inside him was forcing his family apart now too.

Felix started saying something else, but Jimmy hushed him and stood up. There was a tingle in his stomach. The assassin’s instinct again. He’d heard something outside.

“Does anybody else live here?” he asked Yannick quietly.

“No, just my mother.”

“You’re being paranoid,” said Georgie calmly. Jimmy wished that could be true, but his killer instinct had been infallible so far. Then Jimmy’s mother stood up as well.

“I heard something too,” she said.

“It must be Chris coming in,” whispered Saffron.

Jimmy shook his head. His insides were swirling now. “Move to the centre of the room.”

Everyone did as he said except Eva. “This is ridiculous,” she chuckled. “We’re in the middle of the French countryside about a million miles from anywhere. How could they possibly find—”

CLUNK!