Bionic Agent Read online

  “Muscles are good,” Angel said, “but what you’re going to have will be better. Stronger.”

  Ben gulped. It sounded like something a superhero in a comic would have. But he would not believe in the transformation until it happened. He also wondered what was in it for Unit Red. Why was the mysterious organization helping him?

  He asked, “How will I move this arm?”

  Angel pointed towards his head. “With thoughts. I told you it was advanced.”

  “By the way,” the doctor added, “while the surgeon’s at it, I’ll open up your right leg and put a battery under the skin.”

  “A battery?”

  “Something’s got to power all your enhancements,” she said.

  “What happens when it goes flat? Do you have to...?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “No. Once it’s in, that’s it. It won’t go flat. It’s rechargeable. It generates electricity from movement. You don’t have to do anything extraordinary like jump up and down all the time. Just normal walking around and so on will power your arm, visual system and everything else.”

  Ben didn’t like what he was – hampered by disability – but he also worried about what he was becoming.

  Seven months after the explosion, Ben stood in front of a full-length mirror once more. Just for a moment, he had the strange sensation that the glass was a door. A weird boy was outside the room, looking in at him. But he was wrong. The mirror was normal and he was the peculiar boy with the bald head. He lifted his left arm to prove it. His unfamiliar reflection did the same.

  This time, he wasn’t shocked by the damage. He was astonished by the power of surgery to reconstruct a body. Maybe body was the wrong word. He was part body, part machine. Whoever or whatever he saw in the mirror, it wasn’t Ben Smith.

  His right arm was a gadget. No matter how clever it was, no matter how many things it could do, it was attached to him and not really part of him. At this stage, the motors, metal rods and joints were visible, but it was going to be encased in super-strong metal and covered with artificial skin. Even that wouldn’t convince him it was anything but a gadget. At least it would be well disguised when his transformation was complete. From a distance, other people would not notice that he had a robotic arm.

  He put his left hand on his cheek. Pure plastic. One ear had been rebuilt out of silicone. His bald head was covered with scars and odd bumps. Focusing on his eyes, he could see the tiny cameras that almost everyone else would miss. The marks all over his body made him look like a carefully constructed jigsaw.

  Apart from his right arm and ear, his body glowed yellowy-red. He knew that no one else would see the shimmering colour. His infrared vision was detecting warmth. His right arm and ear were cold and dead. A lifeless blue colour. The patches of plastic on his face and trunk were a darker red. That was the warmth and life underneath struggling to show through.

  Taking him by surprise, Angel came up behind him and said, “Ben Smith died.”

  He spun round. “What?”

  “You look full of regret – in mourning for what you once were.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  “You deal with it by disowning that history.”

  Ben hesitated. “What do you mean?”

  “Like everyone else, you admit that Ben Smith died in the estuary blast. Your friends and relatives have had to come to terms with it. Let him go. You become a different boy. In fact,” Angel said, smiling at him, “I know who you are. You’re Jordan Stryker. I’ve got the birth certificate, ID and passport that prove it.”

  The boy standing in front of the mirror was stunned. Yet it made a kind of sense. The explosion had happened to Ben Smith. It was Ben Smith and his family who’d died. The whole horrible experience belonged to someone else. Someone who no longer existed.

  “Jordan Stryker,” he muttered. It didn’t sound right. It denied everything that had ever happened to him. It separated him from his friends. It separated him from Amy. Yet it eliminated the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

  He wanted to start afresh. But it wouldn’t be simple and it wouldn’t be painless. It would be easier for his altered mouth to get used to saying the name than for his brain to accept and become Jordan Stryker. Even so, he made up his mind to take on the new identity.

  “You’ve been through a lot of operations now,” Angel said. “It would’ve broken most people’s spirit. But not you. Your body decided it could take more punishment.”

  “I didn’t always want to live.”

  “Listen. I did some research on you. You were pretty good at tennis. Do you know how many times you came back from losing sets to win matches?”

  “Er... A few times.”

  “More than a few. It looks to me as if the worse things get, the harder you battle.”

  “I was bigger and stronger than most of the boys I played against. That’s all.”

  Angel shook his head. “There’s more to it than muscles. You have to have something special up here,” he said, tapping the side of his head, “not to give up when you’re a long way behind. For ordinary mortals, not wanting to carry on is a natural reaction straight after something as traumatic as you’ve been through, but your body was in no mood to give up. It would’ve been far easier to die than live but... You’re still with us. Anyway, if there was a moment of doubt, it didn’t last long and it was that other boy’s thinking. Ben Smith. He’s gone. You’re Jordan and up for it. And I’ve got more challenges for you.”

  Jordan grimaced. “Like what?”

  “We need to work on your sense of smell. And your hearing. I’m tired of shouting at you.”

  “You’re not shouting.”

  “No, but you miss a lot. We need to sort that out. That’s one reason you’ve got holes in your head. You need another brain implant. We can do some really clever things with sensory data – on the very edge of today’s technology. Tomorrow’s technology really. And there’s physiotherapy. Lots of it. On top of everything else, you’re going to learn how to use your arm. I can’t lie to you. It’s going to take a long time, but you’ll control it by thinking. Just like a real arm. Your nerves will activate... Enough. You’ll see.”

  The first phase of his transformation was complete. He had endured being rebuilt. Now, he had to learn how to use his new body. But Jordan was no wiser about his new life. Angel still hadn’t told him what lay at the end of his long treatment.

  His time in Unit Red was like a never-ending school day, chopped up into periods. Period 1: learning to keep different regions of the visual spectrum apart. Period 2: pinpointing the exact location of sounds. Period 3: using thoughts to communicate with his brain implants. Period 4: a real lesson with a real tutor. Double period 5-6: the infuriatingly slow training to master the artificial arm. Evening homework: extra arm exercises and physiotherapy. Next day: start all over again. And the next: more of the same.

  His life was as splintered as his body. At least his new name was beginning to work. He didn’t always feel burdened by a painful past. He was becoming Jordan Stryker, without a past.

  Picking up an egg without breaking it was a very easy task for an arm, hand and fingers. But it was a major undertaking for his robotic replacement. The stupid gadget reached out and, if the artificial fingers managed to encircle an egg without knocking it over, they clenched awkwardly until they crushed it. His bionic right arm didn’t know its own strength. It smashed the egg every time. And it did the same to mugs, door handles, remote controls, plates – anything.

  Frustrated and annoyed, Jordan raised his false arm and crashed it down on a box of eggs. The eggs shattered, the carton broke and the table underneath collapsed with a huge dent in its top.

  Angel laughed. A pleasant laugh, not a cruel jibe. “Hey. Remind me not to shake hands with you. Not yet anyway. I’ve never seen the medical room splattered with so many eggs. It doesn’t matter. I’ll put the chickens on overtime.”

  “Holding an egg!” Jordan cried. “A todd
ler could do it.”

  “With a real arm, yes. But you’re learning to use something else. It’s much more difficult. If it helps you to get angry, though, get angry. It’s all good practice. Like a martial arts expert smashing bricks with his bare hands. It’s okay.”

  Jordan had to admit that it felt good to let rip. It released emotion and reminded him how powerful he’d become.

  The nerves in Jordan’s shoulder that once controlled his right arm had been attached to chest muscle instead. The muscle was redundant because it no longer had to support and move his arm. Now, when he thought about doing something with his right arm, the chest muscle twitched instead. Sensors in his chest detected the muscle movement and sent a message to the motors in his bionic arm, translating the twitches into arm actions.

  To Jordan, it didn’t really feel like an arm at all. It felt like a Swiss army knife with different modes for different jobs. And he had to learn how to use them all. Until he lost his real arm, he hadn’t appreciated how much it could do. He hadn’t realized that a human arm was amazing. But there were compensations in having a robotic one. He would never have been able to crush the table with a real arm. He’d make an awesome boxer.

  He’d always been a muscular boy with broad shoulders and a body that looked older than his age. A trainer at the sports centre in Lower Stoke had told him that he could be a great boxer, but he hadn’t enjoyed hitting people. He’d decided to hit tennis balls and drums instead.

  Jordan applied the brakes to his memory. He was trying not to think about his past. He was trying not to think about having a real arm. He was Jordan Stryker. False arm and false ID included. He had to think only about the present and the future. After all, that was where he’d spend the rest of his life.

  He reached out for the next egg. His mechanical fingers clutched at it unsteadily like an old person riddled with arthritis. The fingers snapped shut, the shell splintered and the innards oozed out.

  Angel smiled. “You don’t give up. That’s the important point. I know it seems a long way off, but one day you’ll handle eggs without making omelettes and smash through bricks. Fiddly jobs and brute force. You’ll do both.”

  Jordan breathed deeply, crossed the narrow lane and went into Waterlow Park opposite. He glanced enviously at the tennis courts and strolled towards Middle Pond. He didn’t get so tired now, but he was certainly not in peak condition. The bone at the back of his head had strengthened enough so that it no longer needed the protection of a boxer’s helmet. He’d even been able to grow his hair because the chief surgeon had no plans to delve into his brain again.

  He’d ceased to feel the weight of the battery in his right leg. He could almost forget it was just under the surface of his skin. Every step of every walk, every run, every leg movement, he was recharging it.

  Angel was beside him, claiming that he wanted some fresh air. But Angel was not the sort to walk around aimlessly. He probably realized that Jordan was getting restless as he returned to health and began to function again. Almost certainly, Angel accompanied him to provide an opportunity to talk.

  It was plain to Jordan that Unit Red was more than a place to repair and enhance his body. He’d seen more people than the medics, engineers, technicians and tutors who were helping him. As he passed them one-by-one in a corridor, they’d smile, nod and say hello. But they wouldn’t say much more. Unit Red wasn’t a place where people chatted for fun, it seemed. And there was no one else like him. No one young and no one visibly damaged.

  All of the people seemed to report to Angel in a secret room called the bunker. The house was always locked and protected by security cameras. Inside, guards seemed to be on duty permanently.

  This time, Jordan was determined to get an answer from Angel. When no one was within earshot, he asked, “What exactly is Unit Red? It can’t be just for patching me up.”

  Angel nodded as if he’d been expecting the question. “You’re right. The medical facilities were designed for a case like yours, though. You’re the first. Depending how it goes, there may be others. But we’ll fit you with improvements now and again, so we need the best equipment and research. On top of that, we have to take care of our own people if they get hurt.”

  “Doing what?”

  “What can I tell you? Have you heard of MI5?” He could speak softly now. Jordan’s hearing was acute. It was superhuman, really.

  “You mean spies, James Bond and gadgets.”

  Angel laughed. “James Bond? That’ll be the day. No, this is the real world. Unit Red’s like MI5 in a way, but more underground. Everyone’s heard of MI5, but no one’s heard of Unit Red. Apart from my contacts in various places – like Whittington Hospital and the police. The extra secrecy gives us more flexibility to operate behind the scenes.”

  Puzzled, Jordan asked, “Operate on what?”

  “We’re a deeper level of British Intelligence. Officially, we don’t exist. The government would deny all knowledge of us. You see, they have to be seen to be playing by the rules. Even MI5 and MI6 are tightly regulated these days. We’re as law-abiding as we can be, but we have more freedom because we’re under the radar. We take on cases the others couldn’t solve and, to get results, sometimes we break the rules. Our targets are terrorists and villains who are beyond normal law.”

  “You’re a super-secret agent.”

  Angel waited for a young woman with a dog to walk past them. She glanced at Jordan but didn’t pay him any particular attention. She didn’t realize that he was so special. She didn’t notice his false arm and altered eyes.

  Eventually, Angel said, “There’s a bank robber who’s been living in Spain, out of the law’s reach, for the last twenty years. He’s just been arrested at Gatwick. In the news, the story was that the police tricked him into getting onto a UK plane. Well, they didn’t. They can’t do things like that. It was us. We can operate undercover in Spain and at airports without notifying the normal authorities. I won’t tell you exactly how we got him onto the plane, but a doctor made him think he was seriously ill and needed specialist treatment over here. Another Unit Red agent working on the inside helped him come up with a disguise and false passport for the trip. It was a tidy operation.”

  “Then what?”

  “We made a case against him and handed him over to the police. They tell the press and look good. We stay in the shadows.”

  “Sounds a bit tame,” Jordan replied with a grin.

  “It was more nerve-racking than exciting,” Angel admitted. “But, believe me, we do excitement as well. And it can be dangerous. That’s why my people sometimes need medical facilities that are out of the public eye.”

  Lowering his voice, Jordan said, “Are you licensed to kill like you-know-who?”

  Angel’s expression remained serious. “Occasionally it comes to that, but killing’s never our first choice.”

  Jordan looked into Angel’s steely face and decided not to take it any further. Unit Red’s boss was not the sort of person to be quizzed. He was like a friendly but firm teacher. There was always tension in the air when he was around. Jordan didn’t know what sort of behaviour would tip Angel’s mood from cheerful to strict – or even to scary – but he sensed that Angel did have a tipping point. He would not always be pleasant and relaxed.

  Jordan also wondered about Angel’s name. It was probably made up, like Jordan Stryker. Maybe real names were in short supply in Unit Red. Maybe Unit Red’s chief was called Angel because he spent his life chasing devils.

  “Is this all there is?” Jordan asked, pointing in the direction of the house. “One place in north London?”

  “No. There’s a network of houses, but this is the HQ.”

  “When I was in hospital, you said you’d heard about me and my injuries. How?”

  “How did I hear about you?”

  Jordan nodded. He knew that sometimes journalists chased ambulances to get bad news stories. He wondered if Angel had also chased an ambulance, looking for someone he could reb
uild.

  “I have high-level clearance. My computer can get into all sorts of records, including hospital files. When I saw what injuries you’d survived, I knew straight away you were remarkable. I thought I could help. My contact – one of the doctors – did the rest.” Angel stopped walking and turned towards him. “What’s really bothering you?”

  Jordan hesitated and then said, “What’s Unit Red got to do with me?”

  “You’re smart, Jordan. I think you know.”

  Jordan probably did, but he wanted to be sure. He waited for more.

  “Unit Red doesn’t exist – officially. And neither do you. You died. The entire world thinks you died. You and the organization are well matched.”

  “So?”

  “I’m always after people I can trust. Special people. There’s no doubting you’re more special than most.”

  It wasn’t quite an invitation to become a Unit Red agent. But it wasn’t far off.

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves.” Without warning, Angel turned and strode back towards the house. When Jordan caught up with him, he continued, “I want you to concentrate on getting to grips with your new features. Then, if all’s well, we’ll talk about it. It’s definitely a conversation for the bunker.”

  And that was it. Jordan would have to be patient.

  4 PAYBACK

  Jordan curled his lip as he looked at the computer monitor. It was showing a movie of a singing nun surrounded by little kids halfway up a mountain. “What’s that?” he cried.

  “A clip from The Sound of Music,” Angel said with a smirk.

  “The what?”

  “It’s a film. My grandma’s favourite. Things were different back then. What were you trying to get?”