Hit List

  For my grandparents, Maisie and Bill.

  I’m so lucky to be part of the family you made.

  First published in the UK in 2012 by Usborne Publishing Ltd., Usborne House, 83–85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England. www.usborne.com

  First published in 2010. Text copyright © Jack Heath, 2010

  The right of Jack Heath to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Aeroplane photo © Paul Chauncey / Alamy

  The name Usborne and the devices are Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or used in any way except as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or loaned or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Epub ISBN 9781409541714

  Kindle ISBN 9781409541721

  Batch no. 00654-02

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  HIT 1

  Mine Shaft

  Missing Persons

  HIT 2

  Appearances

  The Vault

  Beneath the Surface

  The Hunt

  Invasion

  A Place to Hide

  HIT 3

  My Enemy’s Enemy

  The Dead of Night

  The Devil’s Lair

  Showdown

  Down to Earth

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Practice. It would take practice, but it could be done.

  He moved around the empty room in circles, aerosol can in his hand, dodging invisible bystanders. Occasionally he paused, and stepped back with his head bowed, as if to allow someone to walk past.

  The motions were easy. The more difficult part was maintaining an expression of faint surprise and curiosity – eyebrows up, head slightly tilted, lips curled into a lopsided grin. Like he’d spotted an old friend on the opposite side of a crowded room, and was going over to say hi. His intention was to look non-threatening, yet unapproachable to anyone who crossed his path.

  He walked, he paused, he sidestepped, he kept walking. The only sound was the wind, keening at the broken window in the attic.

  There were rumours that this house was haunted – rumours he reinforced at every opportunity. It would be inconvenient if someone purchased it and moved in. So he spent many nights turning battery-powered lights on and off in various rooms, throwing things at the walls to produce sudden thumps, and playing a battered violin in the attic. Whenever the estate agent brought prospective buyers around, they found fresh bloodstains on the floorboards, made from a foul-smelling syrup of red wine and barbecue sauce.

  He didn’t like to be disturbed. And he would disturb as many other people as it took to avoid it.

  The walls of the room he was in were covered in mirrors. Every step of his complicated waltz was mimicked by the dozens of doppelgängers that surrounded him. He stared at them, trying to see himself as others would. They stared back, each with an equally suspicious gaze.

  A twitch of his fingers, and the aerosol can vanished up his sleeve. A flick of the wrist, and it was back in his hand. He rehearsed this over and over, watching the can disappear and reappear as he walked. It’s there. It’s gone. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  With his other hand, he loosened his collar, scratched his neck, ran his fingers through his hair. These motions would draw eyes away from the can, allowing it to come and go unobserved.

  After a few more circuits, he came to a sudden halt in front of one of the mirrors. There was a picture taped to it – a teenage girl, on the footpath outside her school, unaware that she was being photographed.

  He stared at her for a long time, memorizing every detail of her features. Then he closed his eyes and visualized them. Oak-brown hair, green irises, teeth not quite crooked enough to require braces. Narrow shoulders. Unpierced ears.

  He opened his eyes again. Her hair was darker than he’d pictured, but otherwise, he’d been very close.

  The girl was a chameleon, often hidden behind clever costumes and prosthetic make-up. If his plan was to succeed, if he was to have his revenge, he would need to recognize her instantly. He needed to know her face as well as he knew his own.

  He reached out and touched the photo, tracing the curve of her cheekbones.

  “Ashley,” he whispered. Then he walked back to the other side of the room, and started weaving through the imaginary throng once again. Practice makes perfect.

  Mine Shaft

  The guard stared down at the grubby pass card. “The thing is,” he said, “you’re not on the personnel list.”

  The girl blinked. Wiped the grime off her palms. “Sorry?”

  “Your pass is valid,” the guard said uncomfortably, “but I’ve got a list of people to let through, and you’re not on it.” Plus, he thought, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you before.

  The girl offered him a wry grin. “Does that mean I can go home?”

  The guard sighed. “Well...”

  “I know,” the girl said, “you’re not supposed to let me in – it’s against regulations. But if I leave, they’re one worker short for the day and the foreman will say it’s your fault. You could call him up here to sort it out, but then he’ll blame you for wasting everyone’s time.” She scratched her hair under her cap. “’Course, if he’d done a proper headcount in the first place, there’d be no problem.”

  The guard wondered how long the girl had been working down in the mines. Couldn’t have been more than a couple of years – she looked younger than his niece, although the tattoos on her neck made her at least eighteen. He looked at the pass card again. It was definitely legit.

  “How about I call him?” the girl said, digging around in the pocket of her overalls. “That way—”

  “No,” the guard said. He jerked a thumb towards the mouth of the tunnel. “Go on.”

  The girl shrugged. “Sure. Have a good day.”

  The guard watched her walk away into the blackness. Then he stepped back into his booth, sat down in the swivel chair and picked up one of the wedding magazines his fiancée had left out for him. The interesting part of his day was over.

  “Benjamin,” Ash whispered, stripping off the overalls to expose a patchy grey suit, made from the same fabric as her cap. “I’m in the outer tunnel.”

  “What took you so long?” His voice was crisp and loud in Ash’s ear, thanks to the new earphones they had bought. No more obvious wires on her neck – the plugs contained batteries that ran forty-eight hours between recharges, and were coated with rubber that matched Ash’s skin tone exactly. Benjamin was on a boat half a kilometre offshore, but his voice was as clear as a freshly tuned piano.

  “There was a list of miners,” she replied. “But the guard was convinced by the pass card anyway.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Ash snorted. “Come on. It’s not like it was hard for you to make, with your new laminating machine and Photoshop.”

  “Hey, you need more than just the equipment,” Benjamin said. “You need the skill to use it. Did I say ‘skill�
��? I meant ‘genius’.”

  “Are you done?” Ash asked, distracted. She was walking as fast as she dared down the steep, uneven slope. Iron tracks had been bolted to the ground so mine carts could carry debris out of the shaft, and the wooden slats would have made good steps – but there was a sodium bulb bored into the roof every five metres, so Ash was sticking to the edge of the tunnel. Her camouflage was only effective in dim lighting, and she never knew when a mine cart might rattle up out of the gloom.

  “Yeah, I’m done,” Benjamin said. “If you need anything, you know where to find me.”

  “In my ear?”

  “Like always.”

  The lights flickered momentarily as someone further down the tunnel started up a jackhammer, diverting a sizeable chunk of the electricity. Ash was glad of the din – now she would be inaudible as well as invisible.

  The noise of the bit repeatedly striking the sandstone was like the clanging of a demented school bell. With a stab of guilt, she realized that school would be starting right about now. She hoped the forged doctor’s certificate was fooling her teachers, and that the fake excursion note she’d given her dad had convinced him she was at the Museum of Art History. She’d installed an app on his phone, ensuring any calls he made to the school were redirected to a mobile with a fake answering machine message: You’ve called Narahm School for Girls. All our operators are currently busy. Please leave your name, number and reason for phoning after the tone. Any calls from the school to her father would be redirected to the same phone, but a different recording: Hi, this is Ash. Leave a message for me or Mr. Arthur and we’ll get back to you.

  But what if her father actually went to the school in person for some reason? What if the school sent a get-well-soon card to her house, and he saw it? What if—

  Focus, Ash, she told herself. You’ve taken every possible precaution. You won’t get busted. It’s time to think about the job at hand.

  The light was getting brighter and the noise louder. She’d almost reached the dig site. She could smell the broken rocks, and hear the whirring of the generator beneath the shouting of the miners. She kept her back to the wall, edging sideways down the tunnel.

  The tracks had ended, and the grey dirt was getting finer beneath her feet. Time for the gross part. She spat into her hand, and wiped the saliva all over her face. Then she scooped up some of the dirt with her other hand and dabbed it against her cheeks, forehead and chin. The silty powder stuck to her skin and went crusty, like face paint at a carnival. She couldn’t see herself to check, but hopefully she no longer looked like a disembodied head floating down the tunnel.

  She’d reached the opening to the cavern. Slowly, silently, she peered around the bend.

  Giant sodium lamps blazed in every corner, and six gas-analysis vents hummed on the walls – the modern-day equivalent of a caged canary. The miners shuffled around everywhere like ants in a nest. The woman with the jackhammer was near the centre of the cavern, the enormous machine shuddering in her grip. Ash had expected to see dust and smoke floating around the bit, but no – it was sinking into the stone as cleanly as a scalpel into butter, leaving holes the size of coins.

  A metal walkway, about two metres above the ground, traversed the wall on the right-hand side of the cavern all the way from the tunnel she was in to the other side. There was a flight of stairs at each end.

  It all matched the map, to which Benjamin had added everything the miners had constructed.

  “I’ve reached the dig,” she said. “How far away is the box?”

  “According to your GPS and Mr. Buckland’s map, it should be thirty-eight metres south-south-west of you, and about six metres down.”

  Damn it, she thought. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Tunnel not where it’s supposed to be?”

  “Worse,” Ash said. “The miners are digging in almost that exact spot.”

  “What?”

  “Could they know about the box?”

  She could picture Benjamin biting his lip. “No,” he said finally. “They’re a legitimate company. And they’ve been drilling here since before the map turned up. It’s probably just coincidence. But either way, you—”

  “Can’t go digging for treasure while they’re in there,” Ash finished. “Right.”

  “So. Abort?”

  “Hang on,” Ash said. “Just a second.”

  She didn’t want to give up, not now. She had assured the curator that she would get his artefact back, and she was so close!

  Ash peeked around the corner again.

  “There’s another tunnel on the south side of the cavern,” she said. “I think I can get to it. The miners won’t see me if I stay close to the wall.”

  “Ash, that tunnel just goes deeper into the mine, all the way to the underground river. It doesn’t curve back around or anything. You won’t be able to come up at the box from underneath, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Then what’s the plan?”

  Ash said, “You’ll see.”

  She edged around the corner onto the walkway, feeling horribly conspicuous. But no one else was walking around the scaffolding – everyone was on the cave floor. She told herself that anyone looking up would have the wall-mounted sodium lamps in their eyes. With her camouflage, she would be little more than a shadow on the wall.

  Her footsteps were soft on the metal grating – the mining boots looked heavy, but she’d hollowed out the soles and removed the steel caps for ease of movement. Of course, if a mine cart ran over her foot, she’d be—

  “Hey!”

  Ash’s heart stopped. Run, or freeze?

  She froze.

  “Hey!” the miner yelled again. “Jennings!”

  The woman with the jackhammer released the trigger. Looked up.

  “Foreman wants to see you,” the miner said. His voice echoed around the cavern.

  The woman wiped some sweat off her forehead with a yellow glove, balancing the tool on its point with her other hand, and then passed the handle to the miner. He started drilling as she jogged over to the other side of the cavern.

  Ash let the air out of her lungs. False alarm. She kept moving, one careful step at a time.

  Two miners were rolling a cart along the tracks to the rocks broken up by the jackhammer, while another drove a Bobcat excavator towards them. The Bobcat’s trowel descended, and the chunks of stone clattered against one another as they were scooped up. Hydraulics whirred as the Bobcat lifted the load, swung it sideways, and dumped it into the cart. A cloud of dust accompanied the crash, and the trowel swivelled back for another load.

  The scaffolding Ash was on ended at a set of stairs, leading to the second tunnel. She slinked down, shoulder almost touching the wall. For a few frightening seconds, she was on the cavern floor with the workers – and then she was safe in the darkness of the tunnel.

  “I made it,” she whispered.

  “To the other tunnel?”

  “Yep.” Ash removed her cap and tugged the elastic band off her ponytail with one hand, while removing a cigarette lighter from her overalls with the other.

  “Great,” Benjamin said. “And being in there will somehow allow you to sneak past the fifty or sixty miners?”

  “Nope,” Ash said. “But now I’ll be out of the way when they leave.”

  She wrapped the elastic band around the lighter, tying down the button so a steady stream of butane flowed from the nozzle. Not enough to risk an explosion, not even enough to be detectable to the human nose – but just the same, enough to create a panic down here. She pitched the lighter back up onto the walkway.

  A perfect throw – the lighter bounced twice on the grille before clattering to a stop right under one of the gas-analysis vents.

  “Leave?” Benjamin was saying. “We can’t wait for them to—”

  An alarm shrieked, so loud that Ash had to press her palms against her ears. All work on the cave floor stopped instantly, and
there was a moment of absolute stillness before someone yelled, “Gas! Evacuate! Evacuate!”

  Tools thudded to the ground as the miners fled back towards the tunnel Ash had come in through. Their boots left dusty craters in the dirt. Someone hit a switch on the generator on their way out, and Ash watched it shudder to a stop.

  She should have expected that. The miners wouldn’t want to risk a short circuit while the generator was unsupervised – it was possible, though unlikely, for a spark to set the fuel tank alight.

  The lights flickered and started to fade. Darkness grew from the corners of the cavern like squid ink.

  In a matter of seconds, the dig site was deserted. The miners were well trained – at the first sign of toxic or explosive gas, stop what you’re doing and get out.

  Ash could hear Benjamin saying something, but she couldn’t tell what. The alarm was deafening, and she had a growing suspicion that it couldn’t be shut off.

  “I don’t know if you can hear me,” she said, “but I’m okay. The alarm wasn’t me. Well, it was me, but it’s not about me. Don’t freak out.”

  She raced up the stairs onto the walkway in the fading light, and snatched up the cigarette lighter. No sense leaving unnecessary traces. She pulled her hair back through the elastic loop and dropped the lighter into her pocket, then ran back down to the cavern floor.

  The last of the lights had gone out now – Ash couldn’t see a thing. Living in the city, Ash thought of darkness as her bedroom with the curtains closed, or a movie theatre between when the house lights go down and when the trailers start. But this was completely different. The blackness was so pure, so perfect, that when she waved a hand in front of her face, she felt the breeze on her cheek, but otherwise had no way of telling that she’d moved. In fact, for a surreal moment, Ash wondered if she’d simply thought about moving her hand, but hadn’t actually done it, and the breeze had been something else.

  The alarm was still blaring. They must be wired to an external power source. Anyone or anything could be in here and she wouldn’t be able to see it or hear it—