“He probably is the strongest boy on Earth,” Felix pointed out. “Except for Mitchell maybe. But he’s not just strong. What about everything else? Can you imagine it? He could call a bank and make his voice sound like the bank manager and tell them to pay him millions of pounds. He’s probably living in luxury somewhere. He could—”
“I don’t think banks work like that,” Georgie pointed out. “And since when could Jimmy imitate voices?”
“He can,” Felix insisted. “He told me. I bet he can fly too.”
“How are you such an idiot?” Georgie sighed, unable to hide the smile on her face.
“Natural talent,” Felix beamed. “You finishing that bagel?”
Jimmy’s programming was in control, processing the world around him by breaking it down into millions of tiny pieces of information— including the scent of every chemical in the air. He picked them apart like flavours: diesel fuel, stale bread, rotting vegetables, sweat, cats…and hundreds of other things.
He had never been able to do this before. His programming was growing, developing all the time. The realisation made him shiver. He longed to shut off his senses, almost wishing his own skull could collapse in on itself to squeeze the thoughts out of his head.
The slamming of the van doors jerked Jimmy back to reality. By the time he had come to his senses, the van was pulling away. Jimmy wanted to feel relieved. Whatever was in those crates, it was gone now and nothing to do with him.
Yet all Jimmy could hear were the doubts circling in his head. They spiralled together and grew into a thumping determination that overpowered every other emotion. Once he’d caught the scent of nitroglycerin, the assassin in him couldn’t let it go. The odour brought with it snippets of information locked in his brain. He never realised he knew anything about explosives, but now he could feel it. And the feeling was telling him that nitroglycerin was bad news.
It wasn’t used in construction or ordinary demolition. Too unstable, Jimmy heard in his head. Hard to control. There had to be a very special reason why that van’s load included nitroglycerin, and Jimmy had a strong suspicion it wasn’t to throw a fireworks party. He had to follow that van.
Making sure the other men had gone back into the station, he reached down to the bottom of the pile of crates in front of him. Supporting them was the platform used to move them around—a small wooden square on metal wheels. With a sharp jerk, Jimmy snatched it out from under the crates, which came clattering down to the tarmac. Before the noise had even started, Jimmy was already hurtling away.
When he reached the road he jumped up and threw the platform under his feet to use it like a skateboard. He landed with a bang and the small metal wheels growled on the pavement. Jimmy could see the back of the van rounding the corner. He pushed off hard against the ground to speed up, but he knew he would never catch up at this rate. With a delicate twist of his knee, he turned into the road, ducked low and caught the back of a passing car.
The exhaust fumes made his head swim and the car behind honked furiously. Jimmy didn’t care. He steadily moved hand over hand towards the front of the car, even while it was shifting through the traffic. Jimmy kept his eyes firmly on the back of the van, four or five vehicles ahead. He rode every bump in the street’s surface like a snowboarder across ice, keeping his head below the level of the car windows.
The traffic picked up speed now, but even at fifty or sixty kilometres per hour, Jimmy managed to push himself off the front of the first car and catch the back of the next. Again, he clawed his way forwards, until he was close enough to see the face of the front seat passenger in the wing mirror. After only a couple of minutes, the van turned into a side road. Jimmy gently guided himself in the same direction, letting go of the car and taking back control of his own navigation. He ignored that meek inner voice telling him he had no idea what he was expecting to do or find.
It was a fairly quiet street, with large housing estates on either side of the road. Jimmy hung back. There was no other traffic to hide behind now. About a hundred and fifty metres down the road the van turned off into a driveway. Jimmy lost sight of it and had to hurry forwards. He was just in time see the van disappearing down a ramp into the underground car park beneath a residential tower block.
Then the shadows were lit up by a flash. A loud crack followed almost immediately. Jimmy shuddered. Was that a gunshot? He jumped off his makeshift skateboard and ran down the street. The noise of the world seemed to drop away—the traffic on surrounding streets, the shouts of children in the playground between the estates, a TV game show blaring out from an open window in the tower block itself. All Jimmy could hear was the echo of that single gunshot mixing with his feet pounding the pavement.
Just as Jimmy reached the ramp leading down to the car park he was nearly knocked off his feet. From under the tower block came a moped, roaring into street. The driver’s face was covered by a black helmet, but Jimmy recognised the blue overalls. It was the van driver, speeding off up the street.
Jimmy froze. He looked back down the ramp. A solid metal shutter was dropping into place to seal the car park. He turned to look up the street. The moped had disappeared. Jimmy felt a surge of warmth in his legs. They unlocked and thrust Jimmy forwards—but not after the moped. Instead, he dashed down the short slope and dropped into a roll to slip underneath the metal shutter just before it reached the ground.
His programming was telling him one thing: that underneath this building there were crates of nitroglycerin hidden in the back of a van. And somebody had just been shot. Jimmy didn’t know why, and he didn’t know how he’d stumbled on all of this, but there was no way he could leave it alone.
Of course, Jimmy also had no way of knowing that NJ7 had hoped he would find the van. The driver had followed his instructions to circle Waterloo Station and attract attention with obviously suspicious movements. NJ7 had struck lucky. They might not have been able to find Jimmy, but they’d done the next best thing. They’d drawn him in and trapped him in Walnut Tree Walk.
The metal shutter slammed down on to the concrete, cutting off the last sliver of daylight and sealing Jimmy in the car park. Strip lights cast soft shadows around the rows of cars, lined up between huge supporting pillars. Jimmy stood up and dusted himself off, but the first thing he saw made him feel like his knees would give way.
Next to the entrance was the security attendant’s booth. A cup of tea was perched on the ledge inside, still steaming. But the only thing left of the attendant was an explosion of blood and brains on the back wall.
Jimmy staggered back from the booth, clutching at his mouth and nose, as if he could block out the stench of fresh blood. After a second his insides swirled with the force of his programming. It gushed up through his body, blasting away the shock, but it was too late to stop Jimmy retching up the measly contents of his stomach.
Suddenly, the curiosity that had brought him here took on a fierce urgency. While a part of him wanted to curl up in the corner and catch his breath, he knew that wasn’t an option. Instead, Jimmy found the guard’s phone and walkie-talkie. Both had been smashed—presumably by the same man who had blasted the attendant’s head off.
He drove past me on that moped, Jimmy realised, the sickness rising up inside him again. I could have stopped him. He felt dizzy, but his programming seemed to crank up a gear. It was like a belt fastening a notch tighter inside his skin, pulling his thoughts into calm, emotionless order.
First he found the van. That wasn’t hard—it was parked in the central row, right next to one of the pillars. The rear doors were locked, but Jimmy jabbed his elbow into the catch. There was nothing he could do to help the attendant now, but if he was right about the van containing explosives he