Jimmy Coates: Survival

“…response will be diplomacy… for a peaceful resolution… but if pressed we are ready…”

Eva didn’t want to hear it. Whatever the man said, she knew he would probably be lying. But it wasn’t the words that upset her. It was the voice – that calm, reassuring, authoritative voice. To her it wasn’t just the voice of the Prime Minister, it was the voice of her best friend’s dad, Ian Coates.

A few minutes later he was marching back in the direction of Mitchell and Eva, flanked on either side by Secret Service agents in plain black suits. The sun glinted off their dark glasses and picked out the green stripes on their lapels. They were big men, but Ian Coates wasn’t much smaller. Eva remembered that all the time she’d thought he was an ordinary businessman, he’d in fact been an NJ7 agent, along with Georgie’s mother, Helen. Since becoming Prime Minister, he’d clearly gone back to a strict regime of physical training. The shoulders of his suit were bulging.

Eva watched him striding towards them, his jaw jutting out in grim determination. But the closer he came, the more she noticed something was wrong. His swagger was slightly off-centre and his face was pale, with patches under his eyes that were almost yellow.

He forcefully raised a hand to wave to the press, before they were escorted away as a pack by more Secret Service staff. No time to pay private tributes to the fallen hero they’d all come to commemorate. Not that they seemed bothered, Eva noticed.

Eva and Mitchell’s car was one of a row of five. Their driver appeared out of nowhere and opened the rear door, motioning Mitchell to shift over to make room, ready for Miss Bennett. As he shuffled towards Eva, the backs of his arms stuck to the leather, making a soft squeak. The Prime Minister’s car was the one directly in front of theirs. He paused with one foot in and one foot out, and raised his head back in the direction of the memorial.

Eva followed the direction of his stare and saw Miss Bennett approaching across the grass. She moved gracefully and with a slight sway in her hips. Eva was amazed she could walk so effortlessly fast in high heels. One side of her mouth was curled upwards in a half-smile and as she came closer a flash of sunshine caught the subtle green stripe in the weave of her pencil skirt.

As she reached the Prime Minister’s car, they started talking – quickly and without waiting for each other to finish their sentences. Eva couldn’t quite make out their words, but it was obvious they didn’t agree about something. She opened her window a little further to catch their conversation.

Mitchell tried to object. “What are you…?”

“Shh!” Eva hissed. “Can’t you use some special skill to tell me what they’re saying?”

Mitchell snorted a sarcastic laugh, but before he could reply, a loud click cut him off. The back door on the other side of the Prime Minister’s car opened. Eva and Mitchell both sat to attention and leaned forward. Out of the car stepped William Lee.

His presence stopped Miss Bennett’s conversation dead. Ian Coates looked from Lee to Miss Bennett and back again. For a second, nobody said anything. Then the Prime Minister seemed to glance up at the sky before issuing an order that Eva could hear perfectly, though it meant nothing to her.

“Mutam-ul-it. Make it ours.”

Lee’s response cut through all the background noise.

“I’ll send the Enforcer.”

Eva turned to Mitchell and read in his expression that he was as mystified as she was. Within seconds, Miss Bennett was sliding in next to them.

“What’s Mutam-ul-it?” Eva asked, not caring now that Miss Bennett would know she’d been eavesdropping. “And who’s the enforcer – what did he mean?”

“He means we’ve got work to do,” Miss Bennett replied calmly. Then a darker expression came over her face. “He means we’re attacking the French.”

05 NASU MISO

Felix Muzbeke’s fingers trembled on the glass of the door. Usually he had no doubts about walking into a restaurant, but tonight he hesitated. His arm seemed frozen. He stared at his reflection: large brown eyes a little too far apart and a chaos of black frizz on his head. But in his mind he was seeing something else.

He was remembering another glass door just like this one, nearly five thousand kilometres away in Chinatown, New York. And he could see the scene that he’d replayed in his imagination so many times. Hiding in the darkness when that long black car pulled up. The two huge men in black suits who’d calmly stepped out, grabbed his parents and forced them to the ground. His mother looking up from the pavement, signalling to him to escape.

“It’s OK,” came a whisper from behind him, startling him out of his memories. “It’s not like Chinatown.” It was Georgie.

Although he was a couple of years younger, these days Felix felt almost as close to Georgie Coates as he always had to her brother, Jimmy. And behind Georgie stood her mother, Helen. Both offered the same reassuring smile, lips pressed together, concern in their eyes.

So Felix opened the door and entered one of the few remaining sushi restaurants in Soho, in Central London. There was a time when the place had been packed with them, when there would have been hundreds of people around to eat in them as well – tourists, locals, shop workers. But Felix and Georgie had never seen it in those days and tonight Brewer Street was deserted. The buildings twisted above them, Victorian and Georgian styles butting edges like brickwork pick ‘n’ mix.

Before Georgie and Helen followed Felix in, they both instinctively glanced up and down the street. They all knew they were watched every moment by NJ7, either on camera or by field agents. Checking over her shoulder was an old habit for Helen and had become a new one for Georgie. A habit it was safer not to break.

Just as Georgie stepped over the threshold of the restaurant, a man swept along the street so fast he was already past them. But Georgie heard the echo of his whisper:

“Nasu Miso.”

NasuMiso? Georgie repeated the words in her head. Was it some kind of message, or just a foreigner saying “excuse me”? She watched the man’s silhouette marching away along the street. His body and head were both round – like a satsuma balanced on a melon.

Her mother hurried her into the restaurant.

It was only a small room, with a low bar and about thirty stools, all of them empty. A conveyor belt snaked its way through the place, carrying dozens of small dishes, each loaded with different morsels. Japanese waiters with crisp white coats and stern expressions hovered about, their arms behind their backs.

“Three green teas, please,” announced Felix nervously, perching on the nearest stool.

They all knew they weren’t there to have a meal. They just had to look like they were, for the sake of the NJ7 surveillance. Georgie knew they were all thinking about the same thing: whether the man they would be meeting could find Felix’s parents. He was from a French charity that specialised in tracking down people who had been made to disappear by the British Government. It all made Georgie feel sick, not hungry.

She’d hardly sat down when her mother announced, “OK, let’s go.”

“Wait,” Felix blurted. “Aren’t we…” He looked around at the waiters. They were all watching. Felix knew he couldn’t say anything, but his face was a picture of anxiety.

“He’s just late,” Felix whispered. “We should wait. This could be the only way to—”

Helen hushed him with a smile. She’d taken a single dish from the conveyor belt: chunks of aubergine in a gloopy-looking sauce, their purple skins glistening in the low lighting.

Georgie glanced at the menu and scanned the pictures. There it was. “Nasu Miso,” she mumbled under her breath.

“So let’s go,” Helen repeated softly. She slipped her fingers under the dish and pulled out the three cinema tickets that had been concealed there. “We don’t want to miss the trailers.”

As Helen, Georgie and Felix took their seats in the centre row of the cinema, the opening credits were already finishing. A black and white title card announced that the film was called The Lady From Shanghai, then the actors started talking in American accents.

“What sort of cinema is this?” Felix whispered. “How come they’re allowed to show American movies?”

“Old films are OK,” Helen whispered back. “This was made in the 1940s.”

Felix scrunched up his face, as if the images on the screen were giving off a bad smell.

“They expect people to sit through a movie that’s older than me, not coloured in and about some Chinese woman? No wonder the place is empty.” He slumped down and started fiddling with the tattered velvet seat cover.

In fact there were a few other people there – a solitary bald head in the front row that reflected the flickering light from the film and two girls a few years older than Georgie. Felix thought they were probably students and wondered whether they had boyfriends. He was so desperate to think about anything except the reason they were there that he forced himself to pay attention to the movie.

Then came a sharp whisper from the row behind.

“Don’t look round.”

It was a man with a French accent. Felix and Georgie froze in their seats, but Felix couldn’t help very slowly trying to glance over his shoulder.

“Enjoying the film?” snapped the man behind them. He leaned all the way forward, until Felix could smell the popcorn on his breath. Felix quickly turned back, before he’d caught a proper glimpse of the man. Helen didn’t turn round at all, even when she started speaking.

“I assume you got my message?” Helen began.

Felix felt his blood fizzing with excitement. Maybe the man already knew where his parents were. But his hopes died almost immediately.