Atomic Swarm Read online

  ‘The hole in the reactor wall has been reopened!’ Jackson croaked. ‘I’m switching Tug to manual.’

  As Tug passed through the hole in the thick concrete and entered the nuclear chamber, his video feed became hazy. Jackson, whose own vision was still a little blurry, squinted as waves of static flowed across his display. Tug himself began to become unstable; his engines surged in fitful bursts and his gyros twitched as if his presence in the toxic chamber was making him nervous.

  Suddenly, through the ripples of white noise on his display, Jackson saw two blue plastic barrels, held together by straps, with some sort of electronic device secured to the top of them. He moved Tug slowly forward, until he could make out a small black electronic device. He had to wait for the foggy video feed to clear several times before he understood what he was looking at. Sitting on top of a larger plastic box, which in turn was wired into the plastic barrels, was an iPod with six figures on its colour screen, counting down: 00.00.48.

  ‘We’ve got less than a minute before this whole building goes up and all that radiation is released into the air!’ shouted Jackson.

  ‘All right already, I’m on it!’ Brooke snapped, as she tried to focus fully on the job of hooking two of Fist’s fingerlike grapplers round the belts of the two security guards.

  With the guards hitched securely, Fist started dragging the men back down the passageway.

  Jackson stared at the improvised bomb. It reminded him of a situation he’d been in once before, in a Cambodian village with MeX. They couldn’t even see the bombs that needed defusing back then, but actually, this situation, with Tug hovering only ten centimetres from one, was no easier. He couldn’t risk the tactic they’d used in Cambodia, a controlled explosion, because the blast would throw thousands of pieces of radioactive debris on to the streets around the reactor.

  His only hope was to try and move the bomb to reduce its impact on the core.

  Jackson gently raised the wrist of his phone hand and Tug instantly responded, floating up and over the bomb, dropping in between it and the core itself – a tall concrete column, clad in aluminium strips, which stood in the middle of the chamber. Jackson waited for a pulse of pain from the slash on his head to weaken, then he edged Tug forward until the nose of the robot was touching the middle of the two blue drums.

  Hardly daring to breathe, Jackson gestured for Tug to push.

  To his relief, the bomb began to slide easily towards the hole in the reactor chamber, but almost as soon as the drums jerked forward Jackson thought he heard a voice.

  ‘Tut, tut. Where is your appreciation of drama, Mr Farley?’ To Jackson’s amazement it was the unmistakable voice of Devlin Lear. He obviously wasn’t there, so where was the pre-recording coming from?

  Jackson rolled Tug back up and over the bomb in order to get a view of the iPod’s screen and looked in disbelief at the face he’d hoped never to see again – Lear.

  Displayed on the iPod’s small screen, Lear continued. ‘I hope you appreciate the dramatic irony of you being the cause of the explosion you’re trying to stop. As soon as you moved my device, the inertial trigger in this clever little music player sensed the vibration and cued this pre-recorded monologue. And now, like all great performances, this one must end with a bang!’

  Jackson scarcely had time to register what Lear was saying before there was an almighty boom!

  The enormous explosion in the reactor shook the foundations of even J.P.’s blast-shielded lab, tiny fragments of dust and plaster floating down around Brooke and Jackson from the laboratory ceiling.

  ‘Tell me you got those guards out of there!’ said Jackson.

  ‘They’re underneath the parking ramp across the street,’ said Brooke. ‘They’re conscious, but they could definitely do with a doc!’

  ‘I have a feeling they’ll be getting one very soon – along with every emergency vehicle in Massachusetts.’

  ‘And Tug?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Jackson.

  CHAPTER 20

  Even before the radioactive dust from the blast had settled, Brooke and Jackson had loaded everything they could lay their hands on from the lab into Tin Lizzie: Tread, Verne, Fist, the automated Chauffeur, flight cases full of tools and materials, transceivers, batteries and chargers, and some papers from Goulman’s desk. They had no choice; the streets around the reactor had been rendered deadly by the irradiated debris strewn all over them. And not even the lab was safe from the radioactive particles that would be blowing around for some time to come.

  Brooke was fuming, and when everything had gone into the Hummer’s boot – except for Tug – Jackson had seen her eyes well up with tears. To Brooke, all her robots were like family members. She had sped out of the Fire Proof building, past the disaster scene of burning rubble, and had carried on at the same breakneck speed for at least twenty minutes north out of Cambridge before Jackson managed to persuade her to ease off the throttle and stop running red lights.

  ‘We’re safe now, Brooke,’ Jackson said softly. ‘The radioactivity will be localized to a few blocks around the reactor.’ But he knew this wasn’t the real reason she’d been driving like a maniac. ‘I’m really sorry about Tug,’ he added.

  ‘We need to know what’s going on!’ Brooke snapped.

  She pushed a button on the dashboard and a small TV monitor popped up. Then she poked the touchscreen and moved up through the channels until she reached one showing a reporter sitting in a helicopter.

  ‘We are coming to you live from the skies over Cambridge,’ shouted the chisel-jawed man over the noise of the helicopter. ‘MIT’s reactor is burning! Police are evacuating an area the length of Massachusetts Avenue and asking anyone within five blocks of the reactor to leave the area. Hazardous Material specialists, drafted in for the previous attack on the reactor, are already combing the wreckage. In the last five minutes, the police commissioner made this statement.’

  The picture changed to a shot of an important-looking officer in uniform, surrounded by a crush of reporters with microphones and cameras.

  ‘It is too early to confirm whether this explosion is related to the earlier incident at the university’s reactor,’ he said, looking at the throng of reporters. ‘But we are investigating links to a suspect, currently being held in custody, MIT professor, J.P. English.’

  ‘My God,’ Brooke stammered. ‘This doesn’t get any better, does it?’

  Jackson too couldn’t imagine a more disastrous turn of events.

  A pushy reporter shouted a question at the officer. ‘How could Professor English have pulled this off while in police custody?’

  ‘We believe he had help,’ the officer replied. ‘We have issued a warrant for the arrest of Mr English’s daughter, Brooke English, and British MIT student Jackson Farley, thought to be studying under the professor.’

  Jackson and Brooke sat in stunned silence.

  The newscast flicked back to the reporter inside the helicopter. ‘BBN News can exclusively reveal this CCTV footage of a vehicle racing away from the scene of the explosion.’

  Brooke and Jackson watched, aghast, as a clearly recognizable Tin Lizzie skidded round the corner of the Metropolitan Storage building and shot up the road.

  ‘Well, that’s just peachy!’ said Brooke, turning into an alleyway behind a large tenement block and guiding the Hummer around a succession of rubbish carts. ‘If the Feds lock us up, who’s gonna prove my dad’s innocence?’

  ‘Lear!’ said Jackson, through gritted teeth. ‘He’s planning to sell the diamonds somewhere. If we can find out where, we can end all of this.’

  ‘Given the circumstances, you and I being fugitives and all, and my dad’s hope of release looking decidedly dodgy, don’t you think we should leave Lear to his own devices?’

  ‘He’s the only one who has all the answers to this whole mess,’ insisted Jackson.

  ‘Well, the guy’s managed to come back from the dead and turn us and my father into America’s
Most Wanted. When a guy like that wants to vanish, chances are he’ll stay vanished.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Jackson, staring blankly at the road ahead. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  The apartment was a shambles.

  ‘This is perfect – just what I was thinking about,’ Jackson said, satisfied. Every possible opportunity for storage had been used. Every shelf and every surface in the room was covered in towering piles of books and journals. ‘And this Mr Zeal lets you use this apartment whenever you want?’

  ‘Sure, him and my dad are old buddies from their college days. He leaves a key under the front doormat. He’s hardly ever in town and when he’s not around he lets me use it, when J.P. and I have had a fall out.’

  Brooke fell quiet as she thought about her dad.

  ‘Well, it’s the perfect hideout for two renegades on the run from the law,’ Jackson declared in an action-hero voice. He checked to see if he’d made Brooke smile at all. ‘And it’s got all the kit we need to take over the world. Just check out the retro computer!’

  The antique-looking Apple Mac sat on a desk, in very close proximity to several large boxes. One of the boxes contained fossils and the other two potted plants.

  ‘He should box up that old thing with these other relics,’ said Brooke as she removed some kind of fossil from one of the boxes and waved it at Jackson.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Jackson laughed. ‘My school still uses this model!’ Sadly, he was being serious.

  ‘Lucky for you, then, that I got you out of there,’ said Brooke.

  Jackson didn’t feel lucky. On the run from the FBI. His arch-nemesis Lear back from the dead. No father. Actually, I take that back, he thought, feeling guilty. Mr Farley had sent a frantic text to Jackson, trying to find out where he was and if he was OK, as soon as the details of the MIT explosion hit the news. He had only just managed to persuade his dad not to come across and find his fugitive-on-the-run son, assuring him that he was fine, with Brooke, and would explain all very soon. Luckily, he still had some favours owed after everything that had happened between the two of them.

  ‘So, what’s your big idea?’ asked Brooke as they sat down in front of the computer.

  ‘Bayesian analysis!’ said Jackson.

  ‘It’s never a good sign when I’m lost before you even begin,’ said Brooke.

  ‘The Markov chain? The random walk? Probability theory?’ said Jackson.

  ‘Still not registering!’ said Brooke, completely bemused.

  ‘They are branches of mathematics which allow us to analyse past events so that, in theory at least, we might predict future ones. We all like to think we are in control of our own fate, that we decide the direction in which we go, how far we travel, how long we take to get there. But there are patterns in our behaviour that can sometimes be quantified into equations.’

  ‘I’m getting that brain-ache thing I told you about. Would you get to the point, please?’

  ‘Take you and me. We didn’t choose to be in this apartment tonight; a pattern of events has brought us here. By evaluating the pieces of that pattern, we can guess at where we might be going to next.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to cross this room and bury you under a pile of these dusty ol’ books if you don’t start speaking in proper sentences soon.’

  Jackson sighed. ‘Just stick with me for one more minute.’

  Brooke looked sceptical but said nothing.

  ‘How tall is the guy who owns this apartment?’ asked Jackson.

  ‘Mr Zeal? I guess he’s about your height,’ said Brooke as she cleared a cluster of popcorn boxes and encrusted plastic TV dinner trays from the sofa.

  ‘That makes things nice and easy,’ said Jackson. ‘OK, see that scarf?’ He pointed at a black-and-white checked woollen scarf which had been dropped in the middle of the floor. ‘If I draw a circle round it, I can begin to build up a picture of where its owner was standing when he dropped it.’

  Jackson crouched down over the black-and-white scarf and extended his right arm. He then spun round, allowing the chalk in his hand to draw a large circle on the dark wooden floor.

  ‘Look,’ said Jackson. ‘The circle passes too close to the bookshelf for its owner to have stood there – that’s one variable. The same is true of its proximity to the couch, the desk and the breakfast bar. So, he must have been standing here.’

  Jackson stepped backwards into the corridor between the sitting room and the kitchen.

  ‘If I draw circles round every discarded object in this room and then subtract the points where it’s impossible to stand, I have a good chance of predicting the behaviour of your dad’s friend, next time he comes home.’

  ‘I can predict that too,’ added Brooke. ‘He’s going to be freaked out that someone has drawn chalk circles round all his stuff!’

  ‘Just as well then, that maths means I don’t need to draw actual circles. I can create an algorithm, which will draw them for me!’

  ‘Jackson, how is all this going to help my dad?’

  ‘With probability theory, it’s possible we can work out where Lear is heading next!’

  For the first time since they’d arrived in the apartment, Brooke began listening.

  ‘First, I need the variables. I need you to tell me every piece of information we have about Lear’s journey to Boston. Where we know he visited, where we think he might have visited and anywhere along the route that may be of relevance to him, like the location of diamond mines.’

  ‘Something tells me I ain’t gonna get time to see my appearance on the news again,’ said Brooke, despondently waving the TV remote control.

  Brooke entered ‘Lear +sighting’ into the search engine and punched the ENTER key on Mr Zeal’s grubby keyboard, trying not to touch it any more than was necessary. The Apple Mac’s ancient hard drive purred and after a few seconds the screen revealed the first twelve of 68,600 possible results.

  Brooke quickly found a reference to Lear and the capital city of Paraguay. She read out the text below a large photograph of a man in a panama hat, shot from behind him.

  ‘It’s from the Paraguay Post’, she called over to Jackson. ‘According to a source within the national police headquarters in Asunción, Paraguay, there have been reported sightings of a man fitting the description of missing Internet billionaire Devlin Lear. Lear is wanted by the international criminal police organization INTERPOL in connection with a number of anonymously posted Internet videos.’

  Brooke glanced knowingly at Jackson, who winked and smiled back – in a very un-anonymous way.

  She read on. ‘If the videos are proven to be authentic, Lear could face life in prison for his part in an illegal cartel which allegedly used violence and bribery to trade stolen water in Eastern Europe. He was reported lost at sea, three weeks after that article was published,’ Brooke concluded. ‘In fact, here’s something about it.’

  On the screen was another article from the Paraguay Post website. It was one that Jackson remembered. It had been his first glimmer of hope that Lear wouldn’t be coming after him any more.

  ‘Any indication of where his yacht was when they think it sank?’

  ‘It says that coastguards searched an area off the eastern coast of Brazil,’ said Brooke.

  ‘You can see,’ said Jackson, pointing to a picture that accompanied the Internet news article. ‘If he made it to Brazil, there are a number of ways he could have gone on to Paraguay. So I think it’s safe to say that the sighting of him in Paraguay is a good place to start.’

  Jackson walked to the kitchen and wrote ‘Asunción, Paraguay’ on the fridge blackboard. Doing something productive began to calm him down.

  ‘The article quotes witnesses who say they saw Lear’s boat being repaired in a boatyard near Buenos Aires before it went missing.’

  Jackson chalked up ‘Buenos Aires, Argentina’ on the board. ‘Now we need to add the numbers,’ he said. ‘Has he got Google Earth on that thing?’

  ‘Yess
ir,’ said Brooke, opening the program.

  ‘Good. It’s got a virtual ruler. You can use it to measure the distance between places.’

  The decrepit Mac groaned for the best part of a minute as the program slowly materialized, and Brooke entered ‘Asunción, Paraguay’ into the FLY TO box. They both watched as the virtual globe revolved and Paraguay filled the screen.

  ‘Now imagine you’re in Lear’s yacht; use the ruler tool to drag a route down the Paraguay river until you find your way out to the Atlantic Ocean,’ Jackson instructed. ‘What have we got?’

  Brooke read out the results. ‘The distance from Paraguay’s capital city, to Buenos Aires, at the mouth of the Atlantic where his yacht was seen, is 1,600 kilometres.’

  Jackson wrote ‘1,600 km’ next to ‘Buenos Aires’ on the blackboard.

  ‘One down!’ said Brooke triumphantly. ‘Now where next?’

  Jackson was staring at the glistening Atlantic coastline that covered the entire surface of Brooke’s screen, his finger tracing the names of ports.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ he said as his finger hovered over Rio de Janeiro. ‘What about Goulman? We know he was working with Lear and we know he visited Rio a few weeks ago because he brought you back a carnival T-shirt!’

  ‘So Goulman wasn’t on holiday at all – he picked up Lear and his robots on his yacht and brought him to Boston!’

  ‘Yes, and I’m guessing they stopped off at a port near the Brazilian diamond mine to let Lear’s robots help themselves to the shipment of white diamonds.’

  The pair continued to work through everything they could find relating to glimpses of Lear since his supposed death. Brooke also introduced some credit-card statements she’d managed to lift from Goulman’s desk, which confirmed two locations he’d docked and taken on fuel in Venezuela and Florida.

  After an hour of searching and cross-checking, Jackson had written a list of confirmed sightings and stop-offs on the blackboard.

  ‘Good! Now my algorithm should give us the probability of Lear’s next jump,’ said Jackson.