LITMIR.BIZ

       05 TERMINAL INTENTION

      Mitchell Glenthorne stalked through Terminal One of New York’s JFK airport, limping slightly. His shoulders were broad for a thirteen-year-old, but they were hunched over, masking the size and strength in his chest. His face was fixed in a scowl. The inside of his head was nothing but a jumble of silent curses. He was passing the time by running through a list of all the people he wished he could have it out with. It took in most of the people he had ever met, starting with his brother Lenny and his parents.

      He thought of Lenny, lying on a slab somewhere in London, being kept alive by NJ7 for experimental purposes. Serves him right, he thought. Mitchell’s parents’ only fault had been to die in a car crash when he was a baby, but now he had reason to doubt these family relationships.

      Jimmy Coates, the renegade assassin—the dead renegade assassin, Mitchell corrected in his head—had claimed before he was shot that Mitchell and Jimmy were half-brothers. If that were true, where did that leave Mitchell’s parents and Lenny?

      Now wasn’t the time to work it out, so instead he snorted at how ridiculous the idea was. He blocked out the thought that his whole existence was ridiculous. From his appearance, no one would have believed that he was the first 38 per cent human, organic assassin. Or that he’d been called on to enter active service five years before he was due to be fully operational.

      He held the image of Jimmy’s face in his imagination a second longer, as if out of some kind of respect for the dead. Actually, it was to give Jimmy a double dose of cursing. Jimmy was the one who had given Mitchell this limp. He’d be walking normally again in no time, but still, every faltering stride gave him another reason to sneer at the memory of Jimmy Coates.

      The airport terminal was busy as usual and, as usual, it was saturated with security personnel. Hardly even thinking about it, Mitchell noted their positions and sightlines as he passed each one. After he had made his move, he would have to escape the building. These armed men and women would be in his way.

      Next on the list of people he was fed up with was Miss Bennett. She was technically his boss, but always seemed to act like a sarcastic schoolteacher towards him. Instead of praising him for his part in the termination of Jimmy Coates, she had immediately dispatched him to continue his ongoing mission to find and kill Zafi. She hadn’t even given him time for his knee to heal.

      And that brought him to Zafi. Mitchell took up a position overlooking the Air France check-in desks, lying in wait for his target. Zafi was the organic assassin designed and built by the French Secret Service twelve years before. That made her almost two years younger than Mitchell, but so far Mitchell had to admit that her speed and ingenuity had got the better of him. But that wasn’t even what he minded the most about her. He could have respected Zafi if she’d acted with the discipline and seriousness that Mitchell always tried to bring to his job. But she never did.

      Agency computers had flagged up a last-minute reservation on a transatlantic flight, under the name ‘Michelle Glenthorne’. Mitchell knew that Zafi was taunting him by booking herself a flight in that name. He clenched his fists. As soon as Zafi dared to turn up, no matter what disguise she tried, Mitchell was ready to rip her head off. That’s how annoyed he felt.

      Zafi peeked through the curtain of the fitting room of the Ferragamo outlet. The clothes were too fancy for her tastes and they didn’t make anything in her size, but that wasn’t why she was here. As soon as she saw Mitchell she gave a light giggle. She laughed again when she noticed how annoyed he looked, and how hard he was studying the faces of everybody who went anywhere near the Air France check-in desks.

      She slipped out of the fitting room and took a pink pashmina scarf to the till. Without looking up, the middle-aged woman behind the desk asked, “How will you pay?”

      “Charge it to the Stovorsky account,” Zafi instructed confidently.

      The woman shuddered slightly and her eyes jumped to her customer’s face. Zafi pouted. “Of course,” said the woman, nervously fingering the gold chains round her neck. She lifted the coin tray in the till and pulled out a selection of half a dozen airline tickets. Her hands were trembling as she fanned them on the desk.

      “Get them out of sight,” Zafi snapped.

      The woman gasped and shoved her hands back in the till.

      “Is this Icelandic wool?” Zafi asked loudly, feeling the pashmina between her thumb and fingers. The woman took another corner of the scarf and felt it the same way.

      “It’s the finest quality,” she announced.

      “But too expensive for me,” Zafi replied and swept out of the shop. In her hand was the ticket that the woman had passed her under the scarf. It was a small charter flight, destination: Reykjavik, Iceland. The passenger name was ‘Glenthornia Mitchell’.