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Chapter Four

Laura sat at her workstation in the computing sciences laboratory, staring at the monitor. Line after line of code filled the screen but her hands rested motionless on the keyboard. She’d been working on this code for weeks. It was meant to intercept encrypted wireless transmissions and allow the user to piggyback their own instructions invisibly on any data stream. She’d hoped that coding for a couple of hours might distract her slightly, but she kept finding her attention wandering. She was worried about Otto and Wing. She couldn’t really explain it, but she just had a terrible feeling that they wouldn’t be coming back. She’d tried to talk to Shelby about her anxieties but her friend had just laughed and told her that there was nothing to worry about, they were only going to be gone for a couple of days and there was no reason to suspect that anything bad would happen during that time. Shelby was probably right, but that hadn’t stopped Laura from worrying.

‘Come on, Brand, get on with it,’ she muttered, forcing herself to concentrate again on the complex routines that filled the screen in front of her. She was sure her code was bug-free, but for some reason it wasn’t working. She’d tried to create a dummy transmission in order to test her latest theory but every time she did she was getting a garbled torrent of nonsense instead of a clean data stream. She had deliberately used one of the more obscure transmission frequencies to avoid clashes with any of H.I.V.E.’s constant background network activity, but she was still getting interference from somewhere.

She ran a backtrace routine to see if she could identify the source of the problem, and as the results scrolled up the screen her brow furrowed with concern. It looked like someone was opening an unauthorised socket in H.I.V.E.’s network. The location wasn’t specific but somebody somewhere appeared to be attempting to covertly transmit a message from within the school. There was a sudden burst of activity on the line and then nothing. Laura retrieved the log of the last few seconds’ activity. The data that had been transmitted looked like nonsense but she pulled up the code anyway, just to be sure. At first glance the strings of jumbled characters seemed to be random but then something caught her attention. She quickly transferred the file containing the unusual transmission to the computer back in her room and shut down her workstation. She could examine the file later, she was already late for Tactical Education and she didn’t really want to end up being barked at by Colonel Francisco again.

Laura gathered up her stuff and hurried out of the lab, totally oblivious to the surveillance camera that turned silently to track her as she left.

On board the Shroud Otto sat in the windowless passenger compartment, entirely focused on the glowing display of his Blackbox. On the tiny screen page after page of text flicked past, too fast for anyone to follow but him.

‘Otto,’ Wing said, seated in the seat opposite. There was no response as Otto remained completely transfixed by the small black PDA.

‘Otto!’ Wing said more loudly, breaking the trance and finally getting his friend’s attention. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Learning Japanese,’ Otto replied, pausing the stream of text on the screen, ‘I had H.I.V.E.mind upload some textbooks to my Blackbox before we left.’

Wing chuckled at Otto. He had known people who had studied Japanese for years and who still did not feel they had mastered the language. Otto however seemed to think that today’s flight should give him ample time.

‘How’s it going?’ Wing asked.

‘OK, but you weren’t wrong when you told me how difficult it was. At this rate it’s going to be at least a couple of hours before I’m fluent.’ There was no smugness in Otto’s statement – by his standards that qualified as a steep learning curve.

‘Well, just let me know if you want to try out what you’ve learnt,’ Wing said, resting back against the padded headrest of his seat.

‘Not just yet,’ Otto replied. ‘I’d only make a fool of myself.’

Wing doubted that was true but he knew how much Otto hated making even the most minor mistakes. The door through to the cockpit slid open and Raven climbed down into the passenger compartment. She smiled at Wing as she sat down in the seat next to him.

‘You’ll be glad to hear that we’re slightly ahead of schedule. We should arrive at our destination in a couple of hours.’

‘Thank you for choosing H.I.V.E. Airways,’ Otto muttered, glancing up at Raven.

‘Since we have some time together I thought that this might be a good opportunity to go over some of the ground rules,’ Raven said, her smile fading. ‘While we are beyond school limits you are in my care, and that being the case I intend to make sure that nothing . . . untoward . . . happens on our little trip. So here’s how it’s going to go.’

Otto switched off his Blackbox and gave Raven his full attention.

‘I don’t want either of you leaving my sight at any point when we’re away from the safe house. Where you go, I go, no exceptions. And yes, before you ask, Mr Malpense, that does include trips to the toilet, so if you’re shy I suggest you make sure that you’ve gone before we leave.’ Wing raised an eyebrow at this; Otto tried to keep a straight face.

‘If anything unexpected happens, you follow my orders without question. My job is to keep you both safe and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to ensure you don’t end up in harm’s way, but you have to trust me and do what you’re told. If anything happens to me you make your way back to the safe house as quickly as possible. No heroics. I can look after myself and I don’t want or need any help from you two.’

Raven suddenly fixed Otto with a very cold stare.

‘I hope it goes without saying that any attempt to escape my supervision will be treated as deliberate truancy. I’m sure that I don’t need to remind either of you what the H.I.V.E. mandated punishment for that is.’

Otto did not need reminding. He may have trusted Raven to protect them, but he had no illusions about what she would be prepared to do if the school’s security was jeopardised.

Raven got up out of her seat and gave a crooked smile.

‘OK, so we’re clear on the ground rules. If there’s anything else you need or if you have any other questions, I’ll be up on the flight deck. In the meantime I suggest you enjoy the view,’ she said, looking around the entirely windowless compartment. Otto’d hoped that he might have been able to get some clue as to the geographical location of H.I.V.E. if he’d been able to spot any other landmarks, but whoever had designed the vehicle had clearly decided that windows were an unnecessary extravagance. The two boys watched in silence as Raven climbed back up to the flight deck, only speaking again when she had disappeared from view.

‘Well, sounds like we’re going to be well looked after,’ Otto said with a sly smile.

‘I was expecting little less,’ Wing replied quietly, ‘though I get the impression that Raven is less than happy with being assigned this task. I can’t imagine why.’

Otto grinned at Wing’s single raised eyebrow. He wished he could have seen Raven’s face when Nero had told her that she was going to be accompanying the pair of them on this trip.

‘You do kind of get the impression that she’d rather be somewhere else, don’t you?’

‘She has nothing to worry about though, right?’ Wing whispered, looking Otto straight in the eye.

‘Don’t worry,’ Otto replied, ‘I promise I’ll behave myself, but I want you to promise me something in return.’

‘What is it, Otto?’ Wing asked, sensing the sudden note of seriousness in his friend’s voice.

‘When we get back to H.I.V.E., we find out everything we can about the amulet that Nero was wearing,’ Otto whispered. ‘Let’s find out if it is the other half of that one round your neck.’

Wing looked down at the steel decking, silent for a moment.

‘Very well, though I fear that it may be difficult to find out any more without confronting Nero directly.’

‘I don’t think that would be very wise,’ Otto replied, ‘but there has to be another way to find out the truth.’

‘Unfortunately the truth is a commodity that is in short supply at H.I.V.E.’ Wing seemed suddenly lost in thought.

‘Are you sure you want to know?’ Otto asked quietly.

‘Yes,’ Wing looked carefully at Otto, ‘but sometimes you should fear the truth, sometimes it is better not to know.’

Otto understood how Wing felt, but until this question was answered there was always going to be something tying his friend to the school, something that would stop them seizing on a golden opportunity for escape like this. There was a little voice very deep inside Otto that asked if he would take that opportunity himself if it arose in the next few days. The truth was that he wasn’t entirely sure, but it would still be better to have the choice when the chance presented itself.

‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ Otto replied, ‘oh, and a megalomaniacal headmaster, the world’s deadliest assassin, giant mutated plant monsters, an international cartel of super-villains and the security forces of every country on earth, but other than that . . . just fear.’

‘What are you doing?’ Shelby asked, peering over Laura’s shoulder at the screen on her desk, which was filled with cascading symbols.

‘Banging my head against a brick wall at the moment,’ Laura replied, still staring at the glowing monitor. She’d spent the past hour trying to make some sense of the fragmentary signal that she’d managed to retrieve from the network, but the longer she stared at the screen the further away the answer seemed to be.

‘What is it?’ Shelby asked, leaning closer to the screen.

‘Something I picked up on earlier. I think it’s part of some sort of transmission, but it’s using encryption that I’m not familiar with.’ Laura frowned slightly as she spoke.

‘Come on. Don’t worry about it, it’s probably just the security section’s shopping order.’ Shelby took an impatient step towards the door.

‘No, I think someone was trying to hide it. Something’s not right.’

‘Well, can you put it on hold for an hour?’ Shelby said, sounding slightly frustrated. ‘The senior boys’ water polo practice starts in five minutes and I want to get good seats. It’s the highlight of my week and I’m not going to miss it just because Brand’s got her nose buried in machine code again.’

‘You go on, I’ll catch up,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t suppose that you’ve actually bothered to learn the rules of water polo yet though, have you?’

‘There are rules?’ Shelby grinned.

‘Save me a seat,’ Laura replied with a chuckle as Shelby headed out the door.

‘Don’t be long,’ Shelby said and hurried away along the walkway outside.

As the room fell silent again Laura’s attention returned to the monitor. The apparently random strings of numbers and letters continued to scroll past. The more she looked at them the more convinced she was that it was an encrypted signal, but the key to decrypting it still danced maddeningly beyond reach. She wasn’t used to being stumped like this – her uncanny abilities with computers were after all the reason she’d ended up at H.I.V.E. in the first place. She remembered the sense of disorientation she had felt when Nero had informed her that her parents had sent her to the school voluntarily so that she would not end up in prison for carrying out a highly illegal hack on the command computers at an American air force base. Until then she’d believed that she’d been abducted by H.I.V.E. without their knowledge. Finding out that they’d allowed it to happen had been a difficult thing to accept, even if they had been trying to protect her.

‘Damn,’ Laura hissed. ‘Concentrate, Brand.’ She’d tried to put her old life, her normal life, to the back of her mind – it had seemed like the best way to survive at H.I.V.E. – but it was never quite as easy as that. It was no good – the fact that her mind was wandering like this was a sure-fire sign that her concentration had been broken. There was little point now in sitting there staring at the screen hoping that the numbers would suddenly make sense. She needed to take her mind off the problem and focus on something else. She shut down her workstation and got up from the desk, looking at her watch. There was still time to get down to the pool before the practice started. She too would have to learn the rules of water polo at some point, she supposed.

Otto looked up from the pages of text flicking past on his Blackbox as he felt the Shroud bank sharply to the left, and heard the distinctive roar of the engines change in volume and pitch. They were slowing down.

Raven’s voice came over the tannoy in the passenger compartment.

‘We’re on final approach now, gentlemen, so buckle up.’

Wing and Otto both dutifully clipped their restraining harnesses closed.

‘Well, looks like we’re here,’ Otto said as he fastened the final belt into place.

Wing gave Otto a nod and a small, tight smile. He was clearly not relishing the prospect of his imminent return to his old home.

Up on the flight deck Raven peered past the pilots at Tokyo’s skyline, its perpetual glow illuminating the night sky. They were still a fair distance from the city but they had to make as unobtrusive an arrival as possible.

‘Five miles out,’ one of the pilots reported, reaching for a panel of switches mounted on the ceiling. ‘Engaging thermoptic camo, engines to whisper mode.’

The roar of the engines suddenly stopped, replaced instead with the faintest of whispers. At the same time, the photoreactive skin of the aircraft flickered briefly and then fully engaged, rendering the Shroud almost invisible to the naked eye. Someone who knew what to look for might notice a slight shimmering in the sky as the Shroud passed by, but to most people the powerful aircraft would now attract little more attention than a breath of wind.

Down in the passenger compartment Otto had thought for a moment that the engines had been shut down, an unnerving feeling when the Shroud clearly wasn’t yet on the ground. As his ears adjusted to the relative silence he realised that he could still just make out the sound of the engines, but they were almost inaudible, obviously designed to enable the Shroud to make as discreet an entrance as possible.

The aircraft passed silently over the bustling streets below, its disguised outline invisible against the night sky. Their target was one of the tallest buildings in Shinjuku, the throbbing modern heart of Tokyo, a building whose top five floors had been discreetly purchased by G.L.O.V.E. several years ago and which now functioned as one of many safe houses that the organisation maintained around the globe. The Shroud slowed to a hover above the helicopter landing pad on the roof and then began to descend. At the same time the landing pad split down the middle, the two halves dropping away and retracting to reveal a much larger landing area hidden within the top of the building. The Shroud dropped soundlessly into this concealed hangar, its landing gear unfolding like a flying insect’s legs as it came to rest with a soft bump on the pad. The roof panels slid back into place, once again concealing the secret landing pad from the outside world as the Shroud’s cloaking device disengaged, rendering it visible to the naked eye.

The large loading ramp at the rear of the Shroud whirred slowly to the ground and Raven walked out on to the pad. Two men in black suits and ties were waiting, and each gave Raven a curt nod as she approached.

Behind Raven, Otto and Wing walked out into the brightly lit hangar. The brushed-steel walls reminded them both of H.I.V.E. Indeed, if they had not known better they might almost have believed that they’d never left.

‘Gentlemen, welcome to Tokyo,’ Raven said, gesturing at the blank steel walls that surrounded them. ‘I’d like to introduce you to two old associates of mine, Agent One and Agent Zero.’

The two dark-suited men gave brief nods of acknowledgement to Otto and Wing. Agent One was a short but stocky Japanese man with spiked black hair, and Agent Zero was a tall, athletic-looking black man with long dreadlocks that were pulled back into a tight pony-tail.

‘Good evening, students Malpense and Fanchu,’ Agent Zero said in a deep, American accent, ‘I hope that your journey was comfortable.’

‘These agents will be assisting me in assuring your ongoing security over the next twenty-four hours,’ Raven continued, ‘so I will expect you to treat them with the same respect that you would give me.’

Otto understood the coded message that Raven was delivering. These two agents were just as dangerous as she was and would be just as keen to ensure that neither he nor Wing would do anything to jeopardise security.

‘Agent Zero, would you be so good as to escort these gentlemen to their quarters?’ Raven asked. Zero nodded and gestured for Otto and Wing to follow him towards the exit on the far side of the hangar.

‘You’ve read the briefing materials, I trust,’ Raven said to Agent One as she watched Otto and Wing leave.

‘Of course,’ Agent One replied, ‘though they don’t look like the kind of security risk that they are made out to be.’

‘I know, but don’t make the mistake of underestimating either of them. Fanchu is one of the most talented fighters I have ever encountered and as for Malpense, well . . .’

‘Unusually highly developed intelligence,’ Agent One said. ‘At least, that was how the report put it.’

‘More slippery than a buttered snake is how I would put it,’ Raven replied with a smile. ‘Work on the principle that if you can’t see him, he’s already gone.’

‘Understood,’ the Japanese man replied. ‘I shall ensure that we take all necessary precautions.’

‘You may want to take some unnecessary ones as well,’ Raven said, looking Agent One straight in the eye. ‘You can’t be too careful with these two.’

Laura and Shelby strolled slowly along the walkway leading to their room. They’d managed to get a couple of good seats for the practice match and now Shelby was excitedly discussing the relative merits of the players. Laura was only half listening. She’d barely paid any attention to the players thrashing around in the pool, her mind still focused on decrypting the mysterious transmission she’d intercepted.

Shelby pressed her palm to the reader next to their door and gave a little gasp as the door slid open. Laura’s computer lay in shattered pieces on the floor, the hard drive smashed beyond recognition.

‘What the hell . . .’ Shelby whispered as she looked at the components scattered across the room.

Laura pushed past Shelby and knelt down to inspect the remains of her machine. It was no good – whoever had done this had made certain that it would be impossible to retrieve any of the stored data. This was a deliberate act, not just senseless vandalism.

‘You have an attack of code rage,’ Shelby asked, gently prodding the shattered system unit’s case with her toe.

‘This wasn’t me,’ Laura said quietly, a deep frown furrowing her brow. She snapped open her Blackbox. ‘H.I.V.E.mind,’ she said, and waited for a couple of seconds until the blue wire-frame face appeared on the tiny screen, ‘who has accessed my quarters in the past hour?’

‘There are no records of any access to your quarters within the last fifty-four minutes and eleven seconds,’ H.I.V.E.mind replied. ‘Entry logs indicate that the last recorded activity was your departure from the room at that time.’

Laura’s mind raced. There was no way that somebody could have got into their room and done this without there being a record of it. The logs that H.I.V.E.mind kept of access to all areas of the school were exhaustive. For there to be no record, somebody would have had to deliberately conceal their activities from H.I.V.E.mind, changing access codes, diverting surveillance and wiping logs. All of which Laura knew required a level of security clearance that very few people at H.I.V.E. had. A shiver ran down her spine – there was something very wrong here.

‘May I be of any further assistance, student Brand.’ H.I.V.E.mind’s tone was still cold and mechanical, lacking any of the personality that had once been present.

‘Yes. I’m afraid there’s been an accident, I’ve managed to break my computer,’ Laura said, ignoring the look of surprise mixed with confusion on Shelby’s face.

‘Understood. I shall inform the service department of the incident and instruct them to issue a replacement.’ If H.I.V.E.mind cared at all about the circumstances of this accident he gave no indication of it.

‘Thank you. That will be all,’ Laura said, watching as the screen went dark again.

‘Accident?’ Shelby said, disbelief in her voice. ‘This was no accident, somebody did this.’

‘I know,’ Laura said, staring at the debris scattered across the floor, ‘but I think we may have a bigger problem.’

‘Bigger than somebody breaking into our room and destroying your computer?’ Shelby said, shaking her head.

‘Yes. I know H.I.V.E.’s security system, and believe me when I say that it’s unhackable. There’s no way that somebody could have got unauthorised access to the servers and deleted the logs to cover this up.’

‘So how’d they do it?’ Shelby asked.

‘There’s only one way,’ Laura continued, ‘and that’s to already have the authorisation you’d need to cover your trail. And there’s only one group of people at H.I.V.E. that have that sort of clearance . . . the teaching staff.’

Shelby suddenly understood the fear that flickered across Laura’s face.

‘You think one of the teachers did this?’ Shelby said, disbelief in her voice.

‘I don’t see how else it would be possible to get in here and do this without being detected.’

‘Shouldn’t we report this?’ Shelby asked. ‘If a teacher did this, we’ve got to tell someone.’

‘No,’ Laura replied firmly. ‘We don’t have any proof that a teacher’s actually involved, let alone which teacher it might be. Why would anyone believe us?’

Shelby rubbed her forehead with one hand. She knew that Laura was right, but something about this whole situation made her nervous – an unusual and uncomfortable feeling for her.

‘OK, I see your point,’ Shelby sighed, ‘but this has got to have something to do with that signal you picked up, right?’

‘It would be a strange coincidence if it didn’t,’ Laura replied, ‘which means we’ve got to work out what it says and who sent it. Hopefully, that should be enough proof to take to Nero or the Contessa.’

‘But the file was on your computer,’ Shelby said, gesturing again at the smashed components at their feet. ‘How on earth are you going to do that?’

‘Always make a back-up,’ Laura said with a smile and sat down in front of Shelby’s still intact computer.

‘You copied it?’ Shelby said excitedly.

‘Better than that,’ Laura replied. She rested her hands on the keyboard and closed her eyes. Just as before, the jumble of characters began to stream past her mind’s eye.

Eyes still closed, Laura began to type.