Rat-Catcher Read online

  The dog’s frantic barks grew fainter as the guard dragged it away from the door. Inside the corridor, Hex flicked on the torch again. He trained it on a control panel at the other end of the corridor. ‘That’ll turn off the beams,’ he said, turning to Li. ‘Think you can make it?’

  Li took the aerosol can and sprayed a fine mist ahead of her. The mist revealed a complex cat’s cradle of red beams running the length of the short corridor. Paulo groaned when he saw them but Li gave him a cheeky, sideways grin.

  ‘Easy-peasy,’ she whispered and Paulo smiled back at her proudly.

  Li took a deep breath and set off. She was wearing a skin-tight Lycra bodysuit and her hair was tucked up into a hat to keep it out of the way of the beams. Slowly, Li made her way along the corridor, turning, balancing and bending into near-impossible shapes. At last there were only two beams to go, but they were angled in such a way that it was impossible to step over them. Li stood poised for a moment, judging angles and distances, then she raised her arms above her head and went up onto her toes. She soared into the air and jack-knifed over the first beam. Landing on her hands, she pushed off again, flipped neatly over the second beam and made a perfect landing right in front of the control panel.

  With a flourish, Li turned off the laser beams. The others ran to join her as she swung open the door at the end of the corridor. Hex flicked his torch around the dark room on the other side of the door until the beam lit up a high-powered computer. His fingers were already keying the air as he settled into the chair in front of the keyboard. Now it was his turn.

  Like all hackers, Hex hated the simple point-and-click operating system most civilians relied on. He did not need a user-friendly mouse to lead him around by the nose. Instead he went in the hacker’s way, pounding direct commands out on the keyboard and communicating with the computer in its own language. Within a minute he was into the system and scanning the list of files. He found the file he wanted and tried to open it. The file was password-protected.

  Hex backtracked, returning to the list of files and scanning the names. There it was – a file labelled PASSWORDS. Hex grinned and shook his head at the stupidity of most computer-users as he opened the file, retrieved the necessary password and returned to the original file. He opened the file and sat back, smiling. Then the smile slipped from his face as an unreadable mish-mash of characters appeared on the screen.

  ‘Damn,’ muttered Hex, frowning at the monitor.

  ‘Problems?’ asked Alex.

  ‘It’s encrypted.’

  ‘Can you do anything?’ asked Li.

  ‘There are a couple of options,’ said Hex.

  ‘Well, you’d better get on with it, code-boy,’ hissed Amber, looking up from her stopwatch. ‘That guard and his dog are due back any minute now.’

  Hex frowned at the screen, considering what to do next. The owners of this computer had not scored very highly in the intelligence stakes so far, so he decided to go for the most obvious solution. Sometimes simply copying an encrypted file would be enough to decipher it, because the computer always copied a file in plaintext form, unless it had been told not to. Hex was guessing that this computer had been given no such instruction. His fingers hammered at the keys again as he gave the computer the copy command. Instantly, the mishmash of characters transformed themselves into a readable sentence.

  WELCOME, USER. TO START THE PROGRAM, PRESS ANY KEY.

  Hex smiled at the others before leaning forward and hitting the space bar. Another sentence appeared on the screen:

  COUNTDOWN SEQUENCE INITIATED – YOU NOW HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO EVACUATE THE BUILDING.

  ‘What?’ Hex jumped to his feet. ‘What countdown sequence?’ he demanded.

  A pleasant female voice emerged from the speakers next to the computer. ‘Nineteen . . . eighteen . . .’ said the voice mildly, as though it was reading out the weather forecast.

  ‘Whatever it is, we’re not staying to find out,’ yelled Amber. ‘Run!’

  FOUR

  They raced out of the room and down the corridor, with Paulo in the lead. Too late, he remembered the pressure pads under the mat. Unable to stop, he leaped over the mat instead, slamming into the door beyond. It flew open and crashed against the outside wall. Paulo rolled across the packed dirt of the compound, came up onto his feet again and continued running for the fence, with the others at his heels. They could still hear the computer voice faintly, as it counted down behind them.

  ‘Twelve . . . eleven . . .’

  Paulo slid the last metre on his belly, grabbed at the steel mesh of the fence and forced the two sides apart. He scrambled through, then turned and grabbed Li by the hands. With one powerful yank he pulled her through the gap in the fence.

  ‘Eight . . . seven . . . six . . .’

  ‘Dios Mio,’ gasped Paulo, leaning down to grab hold of Amber.

  ‘Four . . . three . . .’

  Hex came through next, then Alex. They scrambled to their feet and were running for the protection of the mesa when the night sky behind them lit up with a series of explosions. They all dived to the ground and lay there with their hands over their heads. The explosions continued but there was no blast, no burning rain of debris falling around them. Alex took his hands away from his head. The explosions sounded vaguely familiar to him. They sounded just like . . .

  ‘Fireworks,’ said Alex. ‘Are they fireworks?’

  Cautiously they raised their heads and peered at the complex, then they sat up and stared in open astonishment. Rockets of all shapes, colours and sizes were shooting up into the night sky, but the centrepiece was a length of metal gridwork which was bracketed to the rooftop. Hundreds of fireworks had been wired to the gridwork and they spelled out a series of words in bright, neon colours.

  WELL DONE, ALPHA FORCE. YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED THE EXERCISE. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ groaned Alex, putting a hand over his thumping heart as a tall black man hurried out of one of the buildings and walked over to the fence.

  ‘Hello, Uncle,’ said Amber weakly, as John Middleton grinned through the fence at her. ‘Very funny. Ha ha.’

  John Middleton drove them out through the main gates of the complex and turned onto the highway, heading south to McCarran International Airport on the edge of Las Vegas. Now that Alpha Force had completed the exercise, they were all flying off to different locations for the Christmas break. Hex was going to stay with Amber and her uncle in New York, Li was spending the holiday with Paulo and his family in Argentina, and Alex was flying out to join his father in Ecuador.

  John Middleton gave the guards a friendly wave as he passed them and they replied with a salute. Alex noticed that they were wearing American military uniforms. He turned to look at Amber’s uncle.

  ‘Did we just break into an actual military base?’

  ‘Only a little one,’ smiled John Middleton. ‘It’s a security facility on the edge of the Nevada Test Site. You know, where they used to test nuclear weapons.’

  ‘Yeah, we caught a glimpse of that as we flew over this afternoon,’ said Hex, remembering the lunar landscape of craters and huge pits in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Are they friends of yours?’ asked Li, nodding back at the soldiers.

  ‘Let’s just say they owed me one,’ said John Middleton. He grinned at Amber. ‘They’re not too pleased to have been outsmarted by a bunch of kids. And, yes, I admit it – I’m impressed. I had most of my security concentrated at the front of the complex. We thought it was impossible for anyone to creep up on us from behind. There’s nothing but hundreds of miles of desert back there. How did you do it?’

  Amber smirked. ‘We picked the most run-down, hole-in-the-wall helicopter tour company we could find and offered the guy double his normal fee to take us as far into the desert as he could. Then we hiked the rest of the way. I navigated.’

  John Middleton shook his head and tutted. ‘You mean this pilot dumped a group of kids in the middle of th
e desert without a second thought? Some people.’

  ‘We were very persuasive,’ smiled Paulo.

  ‘So, Uncle,’ prompted Amber. ‘We passed the final test.’

  ‘Hmm,’ was John Middleton’s only reply.

  ‘You said when we passed the test, we could go on our first mission. Remember?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said John Middleton vaguely.

  As soon as John Middleton had left them alone in the airport departure-lounge, Amber turned to the others. ‘He’s not going to do it,’ she said bluntly. ‘He’s not going to find us a mission.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Hex.

  ‘I know my uncle. When he says, “We’ll see,” like that, it means he’s not going to do it. When it comes down to it, he’s too scared to send us anywhere that might be dangerous. So listen, here’s what we’re gonna do. Everyone keep your eyes open over the next few weeks, OK? We’re going to have to find our own mission.’

  ‘American Airways flight to Quito now boarding at Gate Three,’ announced the loudspeaker system.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Alex, getting to his feet and grabbing his bags. ‘Have a good Christmas, everyone.’

  They all shouted their goodbyes as Alex moved off towards the departure-gate.

  ‘And remember,’ called Amber over the bobbing heads of the crowd. ‘Keep your eyes open!’

  Alex collapsed into his seat, pulled his cap down over his eyes and slept away the flight. The man in the next seat shook him awake as the plane began the descent to Quito airport.

  ‘Time to buckle up,’ smiled the man. ‘And take a peek out there. It’s quite a sight.’

  Alex looked out through the window of the plane and gasped at the beautiful landscape below him. The plane was flying down the central highland valley which ran from north to south between two chains of craggy, snow-topped Andean peaks. The sun was just rising above the peaks, bathing the mountains and the valley in a golden glow. Quito, the capital of Ecuador, was spread out ahead of them, resting snugly in the bottom of the highland valley. The sun highlighted the red roofs and whitewashed buildings of the Old Town area and, beyond that, it reflected off the surface of the Pan-American Highway, which carried on down the central valley like a long, thin tail.

  ‘It’s called the Valley of the Volcanoes,’ said Alex’s neighbour. He pointed to a flat-topped mountain very close to the city. ‘There’s one, see? Pichincha. It’s still active.’

  ‘Really?’ said Alex, staring at the mountain.

  ‘Oh, yes. They have to close the airport sometimes, when Pichincha’s grumbling. The volcanic ash gets in the jet engines and blocks them up. They don’t like that.’

  Alex smiled and gazed at the volcano, hoping to see a spurt of volcanic ash, but Pichincha sat quietly in the morning sun. The plane dipped lower and lower until Alex could no longer see the mountain tops. It came in low over the fields and paddocks of the fertile lower slopes of the Andes and touched down on the runway of the Aeropuerto Mariscal Sucre as lightly as a feather.

  His father was waiting for him in the area just beyond passport control. Alex saw the familiar figure, standing head and shoulders above the crowd, and suddenly, like a thump in the chest, he realized how much he had been missing him. It had been two months since his father had left for Quito with his SAS unit. Their mission was to help the Ecuadorian army to track down and capture a local drugs baron. His father was not in uniform today, though. The unit had been given a week’s leave for Christmas, and he was taking Alex to the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador.

  ‘Dad!’ yelled Alex, beginning to run. ‘Over here!’

  His father reached out and caught Alex as he skidded to a stop on the marble floor, then grabbed him up in a bear hug. The people around them smiled as they watched father and son, both blond and grey-eyed and both so obviously pleased to see one another.

  ‘OK,’ gasped Alex, as his father’s embrace threatened to crack a few ribs, ‘you can let go now.’

  ‘Still ugly, then?’ said his father, standing back and frowning down at him.

  ‘Still old, then?’ retorted Alex, scowling back.

  His father grinned. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Alex’s bag, ‘let’s get your horrible face out of here before people start throwing up.’

  ‘Sure you can walk to the car without help?’ said Alex.

  They left the building and headed for the jeep, trading insults and grinning like a pair of clowns.

  ‘We’ll stay in Quito tonight,’ Alex’s dad explained, once they were on the road. ‘Tomorrow, we’re driving to Riobamba and catching the train down to Guayaquil. We’ll fly from there to the islands. We can ride on the roof of the train, if you want. It’s a bit of an adventure.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Alex, settling back in his seat. This was going to be a great holiday.

  He looked over to the other side of the road, where a long line of lorries and trucks were queuing to get into the airport. They were all packed full of flowers.

  ‘Some of those flowers’ll be on sale in New York before the day’s out,’ said his father. ‘They’re a big part of the local economy.’

  ‘Even in December?’ asked Alex.

  His dad nodded. ‘I know it’s hard to believe when you can see snow-topped mountains out of the car window, but we’re right on the equator here. The thing is, we’re also nearly three thousand metres above sea level and that stops the temperatures from getting too high, which means this valley has spring-like weather all year round. And there’s a thick layer of rich, volcanic soil on the lower slopes. Perfect for flower-growing.’

  ‘It’s like living in paradise,’ murmured Alex, gazing at the lorries full of bright flowers.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Hmm?’ said Alex. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means there’s a darker side to this particular paradise. Parts of Ecuador are also perfect for growing coca. Do you know what that is?’

  Alex’s dad glanced at him and Alex shook his head.

  ‘Well, a coca plant is pretty harmless in its natural state, but if you muck about with it enough, you can turn it into cocaine.’

  ‘Is that what this drugs baron does?’ asked Alex.

  His father nodded grimly.

  ‘Any luck tracking him down yet?’

  Alex’s dad sighed and ran a hand through his thick, fair hair. ‘He’s very difficult to find,’ he admitted.

  ‘You’ll get him, though,’ said Alex.

  ‘Yes,’ said his dad, his grey eyes suddenly as hard as steel. ‘We will.’

  Alex searched for something to say to lighten the mood. He spotted a sad little collection of wilted red roses on the dashboard. ‘Looks like you could do with some of those fresh flowers,’ he said, picking up one of the brittle stems.

  ‘I buy them from a little girl,’ his father said. ‘She can’t be more than five or six, but she’s out on the main road every night, running up to car windows and trying to sell roses.’ He shrugged. ‘She’s a street kid. There are thousands of them here, living rough. Some of them would steal the fillings out of your teeth if they could, but she’s – I don’t know – different. We’ll probably pass her on the road later tonight. I’m taking you into the Old Town. We’re having dinner with the guy I’m working with. General Luis Manteca.’

  Alex tried to look enthusiastic but he was suddenly overwhelmed by a jaw-cracking yawn. His father laughed. ‘It won’t be as bad as it sounds. He’s a good friend of mine.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Alex. ‘We were up most of the night.’

  ‘You and your friends? What were you doing?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alex vaguely. ‘Stuff.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said his father. ‘You don’t have to tell me. You’re fourteen now. Old enough to have a few secrets.’

  Alex grimaced. His dad had no idea what sort of secrets he was keeping these days. Alpha Force had to be kept from their parents, but Alex hated not being able to tell his dad about it. H
e had always known that there were things about the SAS his father could not discuss with him, but he had never really understood until now how hard it was to keep secrets from the people you loved. Alex could not think of a thing to say, so he covered the silence with another yawn.

  ‘Tell you what. You can have a kip when we get to the hotel,’ said his father.

  ‘Hotel?’ said Alex. ‘I thought we’d be staying at the army base.’

  ‘No way,’ said his father with a grin. ‘We are starting this holiday in style!’

  FIVE

  The traffic lights turned to red and the line of cars and taxis heading into the Old Town for the night slowed to a stop. As they waited with their engines idling, a little girl ran out into the middle of the road and held a bunch of red roses up to the driver of the first car. He waved her away.

  ‘Here she comes,’ said Alex’s dad, pointing through the jeep’s windscreen. ‘The little girl I told you about. She’s here every night. Poor kid.’

  Alex watched the girl as she moved from car to car. The headlights showed up the streaks of dirt on her face. One of her sandals flapped loosely from a broken strap and she wore a dirty woollen poncho that was far too big. Her skinny legs stuck out of the bottom of the poncho like matchsticks. Alex had just spent the day in a hotel suite, soaking in a king-sized tub, eating meals brought to him on a tray and sleeping in a clean, warm bed. He felt very lucky and a bit guilty as he watched the girl move along the line of cars towards the jeep.

  ‘Here,’ said Alex’s father, handing him a dollar bill. ‘You can give it to her.’

  Alex took the money and wound down the car window. Quick as a mouse, the little girl scurried over to him. Alex picked out a single rose from the bunch she held up and gave her the dollar bill in return.

  ‘Gracias,’ she said.

  ‘De nada,’ said Alex’s dad, smiling at her. ‘You’re welcome.’