Jimmy Coates: Survival

Time to dive, he told himself, and thrust the flightstick to the side.

It was like tumbling off the back of a rodeo bull. The huge body of the airbus ploughed onwards, while Jimmy watched the distance between them growing. Soon the commercial flight was a smudged shadow soaring far above him.

Jimmy was in freefall. With hands blue from the cold, he punched two buttons and flicked two switches. The Falcon’s engines sputtered into life.

I’ll make it to France, he thought, triumphant, as his head began to clear. I’ll warn them about a British attack and I’ll ask to see Uno Stovorsky. He remembered Uno Stovorsky from his last trip to France – the agent of the French Secret Service. The man had been gruff, but he had helped Jimmy and his family. Jimmy was sure he would help again.

Then the engines died.

Jimmy felt a violent explosion of panic in his chest. It was immediately dampened by a huge inner wave of strength. Jimmy tried the ignition switches again. Nothing happened. Again and again he tried restarting the Falcon’s engines, but they wouldn’t even splutter. He watched his hands moving calmly around the controls, while inside he was frantic.

No fuel. No engines. He heard the words repeating like a drumbeat in his head.

Jimmy’s genetic programming had already changed tactics. It felt like someone else was routing messages through his brain, but so quickly he couldn’t understand what was being said. Then the knowledge came to him fully formed, as if he had always known it.

He manoeuvred the flaps on the wing and the ailerons until the plane was gliding through the air, not plunging downwards. The design of the Falcon was on his side here – in case of engine failure it wasn’t meant to just fall out of the sky. But Jimmy knew it couldn’t stay up forever either. He looked around for a parachute and the ejector mechanism. Then he remembered: every passenger and member of the crew had taken their parachute with them when Jimmy had taken over the plane in mid-air. He’d made sure of it – he didn’t want to be throwing anybody to his death. Jimmy knew that decision might now condemn him. He was gliding in a tiny plane, several thousand metres up, without any power and without a parachute.

Suddenly the left side of the plane dipped. This is it, thought Jimmy. A vertical draft sucked the aircraft downwards. Jimmy felt his whole body reeling. He plunged through the clouds and saw the stark, white snowscape below. The plane was nose-diving towards the side of a mountain somewhere in the Pyrenees.

Every one of Jimmy’s muscles tensed. The scream of the air rushing past the plane seemed to pierce straight to the centre of his brain, doubling his terror. But he didn’t freeze. In fact he moved so fast he could hardly keep track of where he was.

He rolled out of his seat and climbed up, towards the back of the plane, digging his nails into the carpet. The friction forced some feeling back into his fingers. When he reached the cabin he grabbed hold of the passenger seatbelts and heaved his legs at the emergency exit. It flew open with such force that the door snapped off its hinges and hurtled into the sky. The wind blasted into Jimmy, knocking him back against the seats.

He crunched his stomach muscles to swing his entire body out of the door. He tensed his arms to rip the seatbelts from the seats. He slammed against the wing of the plane and slid along it, the back of his head knocking against the metal.

Jimmy’s body strained against the wind and the G-force while his hands worked to save his life. He wasn’t even sure what he was trying to do and after a second he could hardly see because water was streaming from his eyes. He just had to trust that something inside him knew how to survive. He had to force his programming to take over from the terror.

He swung the two seatbelts over the lip of the wing, catching it with the buckles, then shifted into a crouching position, facing directly downwards, holding himself in place by gripping the straps at his sides. The wind in his face was so strong he thought the lining of his cheeks was going to tear.

Then he flexed his knees, rocking the wing. Over the roar of the wind in his ears, Jimmy heard a definite creak. The joint where the wing met the body of the plane was weakening. With the friction from the fall it wouldn’t take much more to snap the wing off completely. Jimmy rocked harder. He bounced on his haunches, listening to the creak growing louder. Then there was a massive splintering noise, like gunfire, then another. Jimmy kept rocking.

The ground charged towards him. He was close enough now to pick out the rocks and bare patches in the snow. He drove all his energy to his legs, frantically pushing against the end of the wing. Then, at last:

CRACK!

The wing lurched away from the rest of the plane. Jimmy was almost thrown off, but he squeezed hold of the straps and kept his footing. Then he threw his head and shoulders backwards, forcing his heels into the metal. The shift of his bodyweight pushed the wing underneath him. Now he was standing on a horizontal platform – and using the wind resistance of the wing to slow his fall.

All the time he felt the wing swaying violently beneath his feet. It wanted to flip on to its side again, but Jimmy wouldn’t let it. Now Jimmy was surfing again. But this time there was no slipstream to help him – just a vertical drop.

The side of the mountain loomed towards him. Then the rest of the plane crashed into the rocks. What little fuel was left in the tanks sent up a huge black and orange cloud. Jimmy felt the heat of it before he heard it. But he knew instantly that heat could save him.

The rush of hot air was like a cushion under Jimmy’s wing, but the updraft threw him off-balance. His feet slipped from under him and he pitched on to his front, smacking his chin against the front edge of the wing.

Then it was over. The wing slammed on to the snow with a cruel bounce. Jimmy clung to it as it raced down the slope. It was so steep Jimmy felt like he was still falling, but he could hear the fierce swoosh of solid snow and ice under him.

His surfboard had become a snowboard. Jimmy crunched his elbows straight, throwing his body upright again. He couldn’t see anything but a huge fountain of slush thrown up all around him. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, reading the undulations in the mountainside.

The wingtip cut through the ice, firing chips of it into Jimmy’s face and chest. But he didn’t care. He could feel himself gradually slowing down.

Then he hit a rock. The wing leapt into the air, catapulting Jimmy with it. He was thrown up with such force that he thought his bones would be ripped free from their joints. He heard his own voice crying out, distant and unfamiliar. The cold bit at his skin and all he could see was intense whiteness.

Then: THUD!

He hit something – and the total white turned to total black.

04 SEND THE ENFORCER

Eva watched the shadows shift across the turrets of the Tower of London to distract herself from the stifling air inside the car and the awkward silence. She and Mitchell had been parked there for at least half an hour, she guessed, with specific instructions not to get out. In that time, they had barely spoken. She was quite happy to keep it that way, but eventually Mitchell broke the silence.

“So your parents think you’re dead?” he blurted.

Nice conversation starter, thought Eva. She shrugged and turned to look out of the other window, across Trinity Square, to the sombre crowd around the Mercantile Marine Memorial. She couldn’t see anything that was going on, just a neat row of people’s backs about twenty metres away. She noted how unusual it was for so many people at a memorial service to be wearing bright colours. That was because a lot of them were military personnel in finest dress uniform. The civil servants and journalists were all in black though, making the overall effect like a mingling of peacocks and ravens.

“Don’t you mind that they think you’re dead?” Mitchell pressed. “They might, like, miss you or something.”

Eva sighed. “We didn’t get on that well, OK?” she explained. “My brothers know I’m fine. That’s all I care about.”

“You’re lucky you even know your parents,” Mitchell mumbled.

For a second, Eva felt a pang of sympathy. Mitchell never spoke about his own family. She felt the urge to explain that she knew all about what had happened to him: that his parents were killed in a car crash when he was a baby… that he’d escaped from his foster home… that his brother had beaten him… But she also knew what lay at the root of it all: Mitchell was the first child to have been genetically programmed to grow into the perfect Government assassin.

Eva shuddered and deliberately pushed away her sympathy. The boy next to her was the enemy. She had to remember that. Already he’d been sent several times to kill Jimmy Coates. The thought of it made her catch her breath. Jimmy’s sister was her best friend. It was for Jimmy and Georgie Coates that she risked her life every day, undercover at NJ7.

She reached forwards to the driver’s seat and turned the ignition one click so she could open her window.

“Hey,” Mitchell objected. “The windows are tinted for a reason, you know.”

Instinctively he tried to lean across her for the button. When he realised how close that brought them to each other, he froze. Eva glared.

“It’s just a couple of centimetres, OK?” she protested softly.

Mitchell pulled back.

“If anyone finds out the British Secret Service is employing two thirteen-year-olds Miss Bennett will go mental.”

“Who’s going to find out?” Eva asked. “Even if the press see us they can’t print anything about it, can they? Everything has to be approved by the Government press office.”

“I dunno. Miss Bennett said to stay out of sight. That’s all. Otherwise we’d be standing over there, wouldn’t we?” He nodded his head towards the throng of people. “And I should be out there. You know, paying respects, or whatever. I went on a mission with Paduk. I was partly trained by him.”

“You train yourself,” Eva snapped. “You went for runs with him, that’s all.”

Mitchell didn’t answer. He knew she was right. She was always meticulous about detail and Mitchell wasn’t in the mood to challenge her. He also wasn’t keen to dwell on the sort of training that went on in his body: his muscles developing as he slept, his programming sending thousands of signals through his synapses every second to give him new skills that he’d never guessed could be his. The skills of an assassin.

They were both glad to be distracted by the Prime Minister’s voice floating through the window on a waft of cooler air.

“Paduk died in the service of his country, trying to defend one of our most precious assets from foreign sabotage…”

They had to listen hard. Every time a car drove past it drowned out the words.

“…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.”

Nasu Miso? 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.

“A lot of people have disappeared since this Government came to power,” the man said. “My organisation is overstretched already. Every day we get new messages begging for help to find family members, friends, teachers. Thousands of them. Anybody with any views this Government doesn’t approve of. Anybody who shows any kind of support for Christopher Viggo. They all disappear. What makes you think your case is so special?”

“If there’s nothing special about our case why did you agree to meet us? Why take the risk?” countered Helen.

“In your message you said you thought NJ7 might use your friends for some political purpose. That’s unusual. What did you mean? These people weren’t politicians. Were they public figures? Scientists perhaps?”

“No.”

“Then don’t waste my time.”

Felix heard the man heave himself to his feet. He wanted to reach back and grab him, or shout out – anything to get the man to stay and help them. Then, to his shock, Helen Coates spun round and stated loudly: “I used to work for them.”

The man slowly walked back to them. The bald man at the front of the cinema turned round and gave a loud “Shh!”.

“For this boy’s parents you mean?” asked the French man, crouching again behind Helen’s seat.

“No – for NJ7.” There was a pause, filled only by the voices from the film. “Many years ago. I was NJ7, but I left when…” She stopped, suddenly wary of her surroundings.

“It’s OK,” the man reassured her. “This building still has walls lined with lead. It makes it difficult for them to listen in or to watch without having an agent inside.”

“Well, that’s all.” Helen added no more details.

“I see.” The man pondered for a moment and shovelled in a fistful of popcorn. “It makes sense now. Your method of communication, you demanding this meeting…”

While the man considered everything, Felix couldn’t help peering round. He didn’t want to miss a single word. Now for the first time he got a proper look at their contact’s face: podgy and sullen, with a neat, blond moustache.

Suddenly the moustache twitched. “Neil and Olivia Muzbeke could be more significant than I first thought,” the man announced.

Felix shuddered slightly at the mention of his parents’ names. They are significant, he insisted in his head. “You’re going to help us?” he exclaimed, with a surge of energy. He could barely keep his voice to a whisper.

The French man ignored him and spoke directly into Helen’s ear.

“You said in your message they were taken in New York, so they could be at any one of dozens of British detention centres all over the world. But from what you’ve told me I don’t think they’ll be dead. Yet.”

Felix felt a lump lurching up in his throat. He fought back tears.

“If I need to contact you again?” asked Helen.

“You’ll never see me again,” replied the French man. “But somebody will contact you.”

He left them with instructions to stay until the end of the film and go straight home afterwards. Felix sat in the darkness thinking of nothing but his parents and how wonderful it must be to be French.

06 WHITEOUT