Deep Trouble Read online

  For Anna, Sophie, Helena and Issy

  I’d like to thank everyone at Macmillan Children’s Books for their hard work – especially Emma Young and Samantha Swinnerton. I am grateful to my agent, Madeleine Buston, for her advice, and to all my friends and family who take such a close interest in my literary endeavours. Most of all I want to thank three very special agents, who make every mission a joy – my wife Clare and my two sons, Dylan and Charlie.

  Contents

  At a Secret Location – Somewhere Near London . . .

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  In a Small Room Somewhere in the O2 Arena . . .

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Somewhere Between the O2 Arena and Evelyn Tension’s Secret Hideout

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  At a Secret

  Location –

  Somewhere

  Near London . . .

  The female assassin pointed the gun between the mans eyes. Or rather, between his eye and the puckered scar where his other eye used to be.

  ‘When I pull this trigger,’ she said calmly, ‘you will be unrecognisable, even to your own brother.’

  The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his scrawny throat. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he snivelled, a slimy yellow worm slithering out of the hole in his face where his nose should have been.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so melodramatic, Kurt,’ said the woman, rolling her piercing green eyes. ‘It’s hardly as if your life is worth anything – you’re so ugly.’

  She placed her left hand over the gun’s bulbous capsule-shaped chamber and cocked it.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘It’s no good. I simply can’t bear to look at your hideous face any more.’

  ‘No!’ Kurt protested.

  Closing one eye, the assassin aimed the gun and squeezed the trigger.

  ‘Aaaarghh!’ Kurt screamed as a cone of fine mist sprayed gently over his face.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a baby!’ the woman rebuked. ‘And do keep still, there’s a good boy.’

  Realising that the liquid coating his skin was actually painless, Kurt stopped screaming. The fluid dried instantly on contact, turning into a thin rubbery mask. The gun automatically controlled the distribution of the spray, building layer on layer, like the contours of a map, to create brand-new features.

  When the spraying stopped, Kurt had been transformed. He had slightly sagging jowls, a hooked nose and large ears with fleshy lobes. His single eye blinked from behind his lifelike latex mask. The woman jabbed her thumb and forefinger into the mask’s empty eye socket, stretched the lids apart, and popped in a glass eyeball.

  ‘There,’ she said, handing him a mirror. ‘Something of an improvement, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

  Kurt admired himself, grinning at the brand-new features looking back at him. ‘I’m handsome,’ he announced proudly.

  ‘Let’s not get carried away, darling,’ the woman sneered. ‘I think normal is about the best we can say. But that’s good. When you’re working undercover the last thing you want is to stand out from the crowd, which is why my beauty has been such a curse.’ Snatching the mirror back, she tilted her head and teased a couple of tresses of her long flame-red hair.

  ‘Whose face have you given me?’ Kurt asked, feeling the end of his freshly applied prosthetic nose.

  ‘Nobody special,’ the assassin replied, absently stroking her thick eyelashes with the back of one finger. ‘I utilised the randomiser function on the Face-mapping-quick-drying-liquid-latex-mask-gun. It has thousands of facial maps stored in its database so I just told it I wanted a middle-aged man. I could just as easily have turned you into a schoolgirl or an old woman.’

  A second man, who had been watching the demonstration with interest, started to chuckle. He was muscular with a shaved head and a single continuous eyebrow growing along the ridge of his low forehead.

  ‘He’s always been a bit of an old woman,’ muttered Klaus Von Grosskopf – Kurt’s brother.

  ‘No I’m not – you are,’ Kurt whined.

  ‘You are.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Am not.’

  ‘Are so.’

  ‘Silence!’ the woman snarled. ‘We don’t have time for your petty bickering. We have to plan carefully if we’re going to get our target without being noticed. Fortunately, thanks to the Face-mapping-quick-drying-liquid-latex-mask-gun, the perfect disguise is literally at our fingertips.’

  ‘Who is the target?’ asked Kurt.

  ‘Him.’ The woman thrust a photograph into Kurt’s hands. ‘And it’s going to be all the more enjoyable taking him out in front of hundreds of people.’

  ‘Red Alert!’ Barney Jones grimaced. ‘I repeat, Red Alert.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s that serious?’ Archie whispered.

  ‘That’s a roger. This is a Priority One.’ Barney’s head swivelled from side to side. ‘There’s nothing here. I’ll try the adjacent premises. If I’m not back in five . . .’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Archie said, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘I’m not leaving without you.’

  Barney nodded, then turned to leave. ‘All units, we have a go,’ he muttered, holding his wrist to his chin, as though talking into a cuf mic. ‘Operation Emergency Chocolate Bar is live.’

  Archie watched Barney’s stocky figure leave the bookshop. It had been an hour since they’d had a milkshake and a cookie in Starbucks so he wasn’t surprised that his best friend was in desperate need of another sugar fix. While he waited for Barney to return from the sweet shop next door he browsed the magazines on the shelves.

  Almost ten minutes later Archie looked up from a copy of National Geographic Kids and glanced over his shoulder to see what was taking Barney so long. Instantly his mouth dried up and his pulse thrummed. The man standing about ten metres away was middle-aged, with short dark hair and a wispy moustache. He was wearing a green cagoule, brown cords and brogues. He didn’t appear to be a particularly threatening character, but Archie had noticed him loitering nearby in the last three shops they’d been in, which could only mean one thing.

  They were being followed.

  Turning away from the man in the green cagoule, Archie lowered his head, as if reading his magazine, and tried to think up a plan.

  Six months had passed since MI6 had recruited Archie and Barney to join its brand-new sub-agency employing a team of uniquely talented kids as spies. The team had been named S.T.I.N.K.B.O.M.B. which stood for Secret Team of Intrepid-Natured Kids Battling Odious Masterminds, Basically.

  MI6 Team Leader, Helen Highwater, had been joking when she had suggested using kids for surveillance operations because teenagers were better qualified than anyone to sit around all day doing nothing. But the Director General had loved her idea and appointed her Initiative Commander (IC) of the fledgling team.

  Whe
n Highwater found herself facing a potential EMU (Evil Mastermind Uprising) most of her existing agents were unavailable for duty. Agent Kilo was grounded, Agent Alpha had chickenpox and Agent Uniform had just had her tonsils out. With Agent Hotel nursing a broken ankle, sustained playing football in the school playground, the only existing agent available to track down the enigmatic Dr Doom had been skilled computer hacker, fourteen-year-old Gemma Croft, aka Agent X-ray.

  Determined to recruit someone to accompany Agent X-ray on this assignment, Highwater had consulted SPADE – MI6’s Secret Potential Agent Data Evaluator. SPADE had identified twelve-year-old Archie Hunt as an ideal candidate because of his intelligence, linguistic ability and aptitude for problem-solving. He also happened to be a skilled pilot (taught by his father who was an ex-Special Forces pilot and millionaire businessman), as well as being genetically predisposed to excel at martial arts. His mother, who died when he was nine, had herself been an MI6 operative and an expert in hand-to-hand combat.

  Barney Jones boasted none of Archie’s natural aptitude for being a secret agent and his SPADE score had been pretty average. But he was fanatical about spy films and books and he had managed to talk his way on to the team with his encyclopedic knowledge of Evil Masterminds.

  Archie had been given the codename Agent Yankee and Barney became Agent Zulu. Together with Agent X-ray the three kids had embarked on STINKBOMB’s first mission, to thwart Dr Doom (aka Yuri Villenemi) in his quest to create the ultimate super-being and take over the world.

  The assignment had been so successful that MI6 had designated Archie, Barney and Gemma to Team Alpha, while the other four agents had been assigned to Team Bravo.

  All STINKBOMB agents had been taught that if their cover was compromised they could be valuable assets to terrorists, as well as a target for any Evil Mastermind with a grudge against the British government. Whether the stalker was an assassin or a kidnapper or just an innocent shopper, Archie knew he had to give him the slip and head for the nearest safe house.

  ‘Mission accomplished.’ Barney slung a friendly arm around Archie’s shoulder. ‘Sorry that took so long,’ he said, his voice distorted by a mouthful of chocolate. ‘I couldn’t decide whether to get a Twix or a Picnic.’

  ‘So you got them both?’ said Archie, nodding at Barney’s handful of confectionery. ‘Plus some crisps and a bag of Liquorice Allsorts?’

  ‘As a precaution.’ Barney’s plump cheeks squeezed into a grin. ‘Just in case. Anyway, how come you’re looking so shifty?’

  ‘Don’t look now,’ Archie muttered through the corner of his mouth. ‘But I think we’ve got a tail.’ Raising a hand to scratch his mass of mousy brown hair, Archie jerked his head towards the stalker.

  ‘Where?’ Barney yelped, snapping on to tiptoes and peering over the magazine racks like a prairie dog scanning for predators.

  Archie yanked Barney back down and whispered sharply, ‘Keep your voice down! The last thing we need is for him to know we’ve clocked him. Just act natural.’

  ‘Copy that.’ Barney dropped into a low crouch. Parting some copies of Hello! on the bottom shelf he peered through the gap towards the checkout.

  ‘If I tell you who the mark is, do you promise to be subtle?’ asked Archie.

  Barney nodded slowly apparently unaware that the magazine he was earnestly pretending to study was the latest edition of Just Seventeen.

  Archie’s heart was hammering against his ribcage but he told himself to relax. If he panicked he might make irrational decisions that could lead to fatal mistakes. ‘In my four o’clock,’ he said calmly. ‘Ten metres away. Cagoule, sensible shoes, ’tache.’

  Barney peeked over the top of the magazine and twisted robotically at the waist. ‘Contact,’ he said definitively. ‘Although I think it’s unfair to say she’s got a moustache. Quite a lot of older ladies – like my nan for instance – get a few whiskers but I wouldn’t class that as—’

  ‘Not her,’ Archie interrupted. He was pretending to study his iPhone while actually using a mirror app to look over his shoulder. ‘The man next to her. I’ve noticed him in the last three shops we’ve been in. And now he’s over there reading Model Railways Monthly. Doesn’t that strike you as weird?’

  ‘Well weird,’ Barney agreed. ‘I mean, what kind of grown-up spends his spare time playing with toy trains?’

  ‘Not the magazine, you wally I mean it’s weird that he seems to show up everywhere we go.’

  ‘Good point. What’s the plan?’

  ‘I say we leave now,’ Archie said. ‘You’ll have to finish reading about “Ten Bikinis for Winter Sun” another time.’

  Realising what he’d been pretending to read, Barney blushed, slipped it behind a copy of Shoot! and followed Archie outside. ‘We are on the move,’ Barney muttered. ‘I say again, the mongoose is migrating.’

  Forcing himself to walk at a steady pace, Archie exited the shop and turned left. Barney was swinging his arms frenetically as he struggled to catch up without breaking into a telltale run.

  It had been raining since mid-morning but the street was still rammed with weekend shoppers, heads bowed against the icy winter air. The two boys tried to weave through the crowd without causing any commotion. Archie knew they were safer among lots of people but he felt uncomfortable not knowing how close the man in the green cagoule was. He paused, pretending to look in a shop window and stole a quick glance over his shoulder. The man was just a few metres behind them.

  ‘What do you think he wants?’ Barney wheezed.

  Archie pushed his rectangular glasses up his nose and scratched his head through his tangle of brown hair. ‘No idea. But if we don’t do something quick he’ll have us right where he wants us.’

  Three more shops remained on the High Street, but beyond that lay the dangerous desertion of common land.

  ‘How about splitting up?’ suggested Barney.

  Archie shook his head. ‘It’s safer if we stay together. At least we stand a fighting chance if he corners us.’ In truth Archie was quietly confident of defending himself, having recently discovered a natural flair for martial arts during STINKBOMB’s first mission. But he knew Barney might not fare as well on his own.

  Desperately scanning the mass of shoppers, Archie saw their chance. Coming the other way, wearing assorted anoraks and matching rucksacks, was a long line of foreign-language-school children. With each child holding on to the backpack of the child in front, the school party formed a continuous line that was making tortuously slow progress. Stationed around the human crocodile were eight adults, presumably teachers, chaperoning the children, like bodyguards around a presidential cortège.

  Archie knew they would have to time their move perfectly He waited until the children were just about to pass in front of the entrance to a big department store.

  ‘In here. Quick!’

  Suddenly Archie grabbed Barney’s wrist and hauled him sideways. The two boys darted across the flow of human traffic, brushing in front of the teacher at the head of the school party.

  ‘Sorry miss!’ Barney called over his shoulder.

  As they jogged into the shop Archie spun round to check on their pursuer and saw the man in the green cagoule still outside. His head and shoulders were visible beyond the procession of schoolkids who were blocking his path to the doorway. He was frowning and frantically scanning the line of children. Suddenly he looked up and locked his eyes on the entrance to the department store.

  Archie turned and considered his options. He had to think fast.

  ‘This way,’ he whispered as he led Barney towards the rails of women’s nightwear at the back of the shop. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

  The man in the green cagoule smiled stiffly at the school kids dawdling across his path. He was tempted to barge through them but that would draw unwanted attention to him. ‘Patience, old boy,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Assassins are invisible, like falling snow.’

  Finally the line of children dispersed and he strode bri
skly into the shop. The delay had cost him valuable seconds, maybe a minute, and now his prey was nowhere to be seen.

  He paused and searched the vast sprawl of clothes and shoppers before him, his eyes darting around eagerly. The boys might have given him the slip but they had nowhere to go. All the shop’s emergency exits would be alarmed so the only way his targets could escape surreptitiously was by going out the way they came in. And to do that, they had to get past him.

  The man slowly turned his head and his eyes locked on something at the far end of the store. Protruding just an inch above a clothes rail laden with women’s pyjamas, he could make out a sliver of navy fabric. It was the hood off a boy’s sweatshirt.

  ‘Bingo,’ he whispered.

  As his eyes grew accustomed to the collage of shapes and patterns, he was able to distinguish the light grey of the other boy’s hoody.

  ‘Looks like I get to kill two birds with one stone,’ he muttered. Then he strode down an aisle that led across the front of the store – initially heading ninety degrees away from his target.

  Having negotiated a circuitous route round the edge of the shop, the man in the green cagoule approached the two hooded figures from behind.

  ‘Dear oh dear,’ he smiled to himself. ‘This is almost too easy.’

  As he came within striking range he pulled his leather gloves tight, flexing his fingers. Silently coming to a stop right behind the boys, he allowed himself a triumphant smirk.

  ‘Bang, bang,’ he mouthed. ‘You’re dead.’

  The man reached a leather-clad hand out towards the nearest boy and snatched at his collar. But, as he grabbed a fistful of material, the boy rocked forward, leaving behind his sweatshirt, which had been draped over his shoulders. With the hoody hanging limply in the mans fist the boy toppled over, like a falling tree, and hit the ground with a thwack. He lay face down, motionless – one arm twisted at an impossible angle.

  Yanking the hood of the other boy’s head, the man grimaced.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he sighed. ‘Outsmarted by a couple of dummies.’