Aftershock by Mark Walden Read Free Book Online Page B

will keep this school safe. No matter what the cost.’

    Raven watched from the monitoring station in the belly of the Shroud as retrieval teams all around the world provided constant status updates on their operations. She was not the sort of person to suffer from stress but this was the one occasion every year which, she conceded, she found slightly worrying. Part of it was that there was no way that she could be there for each retrieval operation personally but the other part was that she knew how important it was to Nero that every one of these children be retrieved successfully. She had stopped worrying about the rights and wrongs of recruiting H.I.V.E.’s new students in this way many years ago. They were being saved from lives of mediocrity and being given the sort of opportunity that would change their lives for the better for ever. Besides which, all of them had done something to earn their place at H.I.V.E. None of them were angels.
    She continued to scan the reports coming in. She wasn’t worried about the legacy student retrievals. They were simple since they occurred with the full knowledge of the parents or guardians of the children involved. No, the tricky ones were the other students, the children who had earned their place through merit, if that was really the right word under the circumstances. Those were the operations that Raven watched most closely.
    ‘Team nine, retrieval complete,’ a voice crackled over the comms system. Team nine, Brazilian girl, ran a team of pickpockets in the favela. Exceptional leadership skills, master of stealth and evasion, highly adept thief. Alpha stream candidate.
    ‘Team seventeen, retrieval complete,’ another voice reported. Team seventeen, American boy, son of a wealthy banker. Siphoned nearly a million dollars from the accounts of his father and his golf club buddies by cloning their credit cards while they were out on the fairways. Politics and Finance stream candidate.
    ‘Team twenty-nine, retrieval complete.’ Russian boy, assassin for the mob. Used age as cover to get close to targets. Highly skilled with pistols and knives. Henchman stream candidate. That was one she’d been worried about.
    And so the reports continued to roll in. No problems so far but there was plenty of time yet.
    ‘We’re over the target area,’ a voice in her earpiece said.
    ‘Roger that,’ Raven replied, pulling the black mask over her head. The black lenses activated, giving her perfect twenty-twenty, full-colour night vision. She walked towards the rear of the passenger compartment and checked her equipment rig one last time. Satisfied that everything was in place she slapped the hatch release and stepped out on to the ramp. The ground was only a couple of metres below and she jumped down and landed silently.
    ‘Raven down,’ she reported. ‘Clear and stay on station.’
    ‘Roger,’ the pilot of the Shroud replied as the hatch whirred shut and the Shroud climbed silently to a holding altitude.
    Raven checked her surroundings. The surveillance team had reported that her targets had entered the underground parking garage just a few minutes earlier. Targets, plural – that was why she was here. Double retrievals were unusual and difficult. She ran down the ramp and scanned the garage, her lenses instantly adjusting to compensate for the fluorescent strip lighting overhead. She heard the roar of a powerful engine from one of the lower floors and flattened herself against one of the support columns next to the exit ramp. She peered round the column’s edge just in time to see an expensive Italian sports car power-sliding round the corner at the far end of the garage. Raven took a deep breath and stepped out into the middle of the exit ramp.
    The driver of the car instinctively swerved to avoid the black-clad figure that suddenly stepped out into the road in front of him. As the car shot past her Raven’s swords flashed and the front right wheel disintegrated. The car went