His current employers had installed their patented software for running the environmental features of a new five-star-rated building at Canary Wharf, London’s modern financial district, but due to a serious systems glitch the local authorities were refusing to hand over their completion certificate so none of the tenants could move in. Jax was over here to fix it. “Don’t leave the building till it’s done,” was his simple brief, but it was one he ignored daily, stealing a few hours here and there to take in the sights since he hadn’t been to London before.
He flicked back his hair but, from out here on the terrace across the empty blacked-out floor, all he could make out was the elevator’s flashing “14”. He squinted, and when the doors shushed open, two occupants stepped out, not one. With the light behind them, he couldn’t glimpse their faces but neither of their body shapes was anything like the nightwatchman’s. Jax’s smile dropped, sending a glint of reflected moonlight from his lenses to the visitors.
“Jax Mason, is that you over there?”
She was British, Jax decided, hardly surprised. He couldn’t make out the badge she seemed to be waving in front of her, but her confident strides toward him and her, but her confident strides toward him and her stubby companion’s menacing swagger instantly made Jax’s skin crawl, and his head suddenly squirmed with the thought that 14th floors were usually 13ths.
A frosty wind blew up from the River Thames two hundred feet below, though he wondered if it was nerves.
“Jax Mason?” she insisted.
“Yeah, that’s m-me. Y-you?” Jax tried to calm the anxiety trembling out of him. He stammered at the best of times, though this didn’t seem like one of them. He took her hand, but her sneer suggested he should have gripped it harder, or maybe first wiped the sweat off his own hand on his jeans. She was an eyeful, for sure, but that only increased Jax’s edginess. He wasn’t good around women. Or men. But especially women.
“I’m Diana Hunter,” she lied and, tilting her head toward her slightly hunch-backed colleague, continued, “And this is Lucky.”
Even in this dim light, Jax noted that Lucky’s face looked like he shaved with a chisel, possibly why he had the chipped front tooth.
“We’re MI6,” Diana explained, brushing back a strand of her blonde hair, but not so far back that Jax could have guessed it was a wig, even in good light.
2
MI6 WAS THE UK’s secret intelligence service; Jax knew that. When he’d goofed off on a River Thames tourist cruise three days earlier, the loudspeaker commentary had specifically pointed out MI6’s building. Some secret service, he’d smirked at the time.
As Diana kept a grip on Jax’s hand, her piercing brown eyes bored into him so long he noticed that one of her contact lenses was askew. If the lights had been on, he might have detected that her real eye-colour was blue.
He coughed as an excuse to remove his hand from hers. “Like, wh-what do you guys want?” he stuttered, mainly out of habit and not entirely from fear. Where, Jax sweated, was actor Geoffrey Rush when he needed him, or better than Rush, a real speech therapist?
“Mr Mason. Recently you posted a blog about your subway shockwave simulation.” Jax had posted several blogs on the web about his intricate computer model, boasting it was mathematical proof that terrorists could build up and hurtle a shockwave through a city’s subway system that was so ferocious it could suck down and destroy the entire metropolis above it. All they needed to know was precisely on which platforms to set off a hair-trigger-timed series of relatively small explosions.
As Jax gripped the terrace railing, the cold metal drew the remaining heat out of him. Months ago, he had contacted the US government about his computer model, a radical step for an anarchist like him. But Homeland Security flicked him straight into crackpot corner. He tried to tell them: if Jax Mason working alone could create something like this, what could more malign parties do? But if the US government wouldn’t listen, why was MI6 popping up out of the blue?
As if she could read his mind, Diana answered his question, “The Prime Minister is acutely sensitive after the bombings over here. He wants you to help us design baffles for London’s Tube to prevent one of these shockwaves. For a considerable retainer, of course.”
They were going to pay him? Working for the government? Normally that would be against his principles, but this wasn’t his government, nor even his adopted government… and then there was the money.
He shifted his gaze from Diana to the other spook, but only for a second, chilled by the stare penetrating him from Lucky’s pencil-points. Lucky usually didn’t say much, words not being his preferred tools of persuasion. While Jax didn’t know that, he somehow sensed that any hand big enough to crush his skull by itself would do Lucky’s speaking for him.