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  Cate stepped into the lift and hit the button for the top floor. Within seconds, the doors were opening on to the roof terrace. She turned left as instructed and, a few metres on, stopped in her tracks. It was quiet. Far too quiet. Cate had been expecting to see bustle and activity, hear voices shouting instructions from the shoot, maybe even spot the odd band member wandering around eating breakfast. She sniffed. The porter had said that breakfast had just been sent up and yet all she could smell was sea air and a faint smell of diesel fumes.

  She was puzzled now and slightly wary. Perhaps it was some kind of practical joke, the band having a good laugh at her as they ate their breakfast round the pool just a few storeys below.

  She walked up to the entrance of the terrace then poked her head cautiously around it. Her heart turned a somersault. There in front of her was the olive green helicopter she had seen flying over her just a few minutes earlier. Standing by it, looking tense and alert, were two beefy men, both sporting short back and sides haircuts and dressed in anonymous green boiler suits. They looked tough, fit, not to be messed with.

  Inside the front window of the unmarked chopper a pilot sat still, his helmet and goggles just about discernable through the dark tinted windows. Ready for a quick take off, Cate thought with a shudder. Then she heard one of the men talking.

  ‘If she is not here soon we’ll go and look for her,’ he said. ‘They told us she might be tricky.’

  The other man laughed. ‘She’s a sixteen-year-old kid,’ he said. ‘How can she be a problem for us?’

  The first man shrugged. ‘Anton said he saw her go into the lift. So where is she now?’

  Cate flattened herself against the warm wall, her heart racing. Someone had set a trap and she had walked right into it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Cate raced through her options. She could try the lift but she had heard it whirring downwards as she left and by the time it came back the men would have found her. There were bound to be some stairs, but she didn’t know where they were.

  Her heart began to race. She reached into her pocket for her phone. She couldn’t call for help – she would be heard. She considered texting Nancy – but the supermodel probably wouldn’t even be awake. She sighed and switched her phone to silent. For now she was on her own.

  She edged back towards the lift – her only option. She pressed the button, her heart pounding as she heard the whirr of the lift coming up towards her. Cate looked around, searching in vain for anything she could use to protect herself. There was nothing. The corridor was sterile, immaculate. In desperation she looked down at her clothes. Her hands brushed against her belt and within seconds she had whipped it off, wound the thin leather around her wrist and clasped the buckle in her fist, the point protruding through her fingers. It wasn’t perfect but it was better than nothing. She looked down through the glass panels and could see the top of the lift just seconds away from her. There was a quiet beep and the doors swooped open.

  ‘There you are, Cate Carlisle,’ said the porter from inside the lift, his pale face and black outfit giving him the look of an undertaker. ‘We thought you’d got lost. We can’t have that now, can we?’

  Cate stared up at him, her heart pounding partly with fear, partly with anger. Whatever these men wanted with her, she wasn’t going to give herself up without a fight.

  Still staring into the dark eyes of the man in front of her she brought her right hand up hard. Expecting a blow, the man brought his left hand up to stop her, leaving his face open and defenceless as the buckle slammed into the corner of his eye. He grunted, instinctively bringing his hands up to his face and Cate, seizing the opportunity, brought her knee up hard into his groin. He bent double, gasping for breath and with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, Cate grabbed his thick hair and rammed his head hard against the inside of the lift. The man groaned and fell down onto the floor in a heap. Cate pressed the ground floor button and, just as the doors were closing, stepped quickly out of the lift.

  She silently turned right, and right again to get back out into the roof garden away from the men. Beside her was the back of the lift shaft. She looked up at its roof, took a few steps back, then ran and leapt at the wall and somehow her fingers found the rough edges of the roof. She hung there painfully for a few seconds before she pulled herself up half dragging, half rolling herself onto the hot white surface. She lay flat on her stomach, panting quietly, scanning the terrace below.

  She could see the top of the helicopter and one man talking on a mobile. He looked angry. Had the porter called him? He finished the call and motioned to the other man with hand signals that she had seen British soldiers use.

  She watched as they split up, each going one way around the lift shaft. Cate held her breath, praying they wouldn’t look up.

  Who on earth would want her so badly that they would send three men and a helicopter to capture her?

  She slid her phone out of her pocket. She had to get help somehow. Nancy. The police. Anyone.

  Suddenly, the phone vibrated and a message flashed up. It was from Marcus at the IMIA.

  Cate was confused. Could the man smell trouble from the other side of the world? She opened the message and nearly dropped the phone.

  Cate, get down from your perch and come for a helicopter ride.

  Cate looked at the message again and then back over at the helicopter. The pilot had taken his helmet off and was standing by the helicopter, waving at her cheerfully.

  ‘Marcus!’ she yelled, half angry, half relieved. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

  ‘Well?’ shouted Cate crossly, trying to make herself heard over the noise of the helicopter as it flew swiftly out over the blue water of the harbour. ‘What’s all this about? Honestly, Marcus, you frightened me to death back there.’

  Marcus turned to her, a huge grin on his face. ‘All in good time, Cate. But I must say, I was impressed with the way you dealt with poor old Luigi. He’s got one heck of a headache and he’ll have a real shiner in the morning.’

  Cate scowled at him. ‘You set me up – with your own men. Don’t even ask me to work that one out, Marcus.’

  ‘Nearly there now,’ Marcus said, ignoring her grumbles as he lowered the chopper so that it skimmed the top of the water. He pointed up ahead. ‘Your destination awaits you, madam.’

  As the helicopter circled the small, diamond-shaped island, Cate picked out a few long, low buildings amongst the densely packed trees. The corrugated iron roofs and faded tarmac squares gave the game away. Army quarters, thought Cate, sitting up straight in her chair.

  The helicopter dropped gently downwards, landing with a jolt on a small patch of ground. As the blades slowed to a stop, Cate could see a man standing, still and watchful, in the doorway of a shabby prefabricated hut. His dark skin, bold nose and squat powerful body weren’t that distinctive, but Cate recognised him immediately from the way he stood. Even from that distance she could sense his power, his authority, his utter self-confidence. What on earth was Henri Sorenzki, the head of the International Maritime Intelligence Agency, doing on an island in Sydney Harbour?

  Cate undid her harness, pushed the door open, stepped down onto the hot concrete and marched angrily over to him. ‘Henri,’ she said, ignoring his outstretched hand. ‘What’s the deal? You haven’t sent three heavies and a helicopter to get me because you’re missing my company. And why heavies in the first place? Just the helicopter and a polite request would have been far more effective.’

  ‘Now then, Cate, that’s a fine way to greet an old friend,’ said Henri. He was dressed immaculately as always, in perfectly pressed navy blue chinos and a dazzlingly white shirt and blue tie, his tanned face inscrutable behind his sunglasses. ‘Welcome to Diamond Island. I told you when we said au revoir last summer that we would meet again soon and, well, here we are, meeting again soon.’ His voice took on a mock hurt tone. ‘I thought you’d be pleased to see me.’

  Cate glared at him. ‘You haven’t a
nswered my questions.’

  Henri looked at her calmly, then nodded. ‘OK. I’ll tell you why. We wanted to know whether you still had the guts that you showed us last summer, the ability to handle yourself in certain situations. After all, you might have returned to that girls’ school of yours and gone soft on us.’

  Marcus had caught up with her and Cate looked at both men calculatingly. If she had learnt one thing from her adventures with Marcus and Henri last summer, it was that there was never any point in losing your cool with them.

  She took a deep breath. ‘Well, now you know. So you’ve had your question answered. And now I can go back to my friends and get on with enjoying my holiday. Marcus – do you mind?’ She turned towards the helicopter.

  Henri looked at Marcus. ‘She hasn’t mellowed, has she?’ he said. ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘Good – I think,’ said Marcus, grinning. ‘Look, Cate, before you go charging back to the mainland the least we can do is offer you some breakfast. I hear you missed out on yours.’

  Cate, who was already walking towards the helicopter, stopped in her tracks. She was starving, it was true. She also had to admit that despite her bravado, she was curious, very curious. The IMIA had brought her here for a reason and now, dammit, she had to know what it was.

  She looked down at her watch. It was only just gone ten o’clock and she doubted that Nancy had even registered that she had left the penthouse. ‘It had better be a good breakfast,’ she said.

  After the bright sunshine, the interior of the brick shed was dark and gloomy, the atmosphere cool, almost clammy. It didn’t help that the windows were tiny and placed high up in the eaves, any natural light more than overpowered by the fluorescent striplights, which seemed to pick out the stained paintwork and tattered linoleum on the floor.

  ‘It’s the damp,’ said Henri, noticing Cate’s expression as she looked around. ‘This place was built on a swamp.’ He slapped at a mosquito that was buzzing around his face. ‘But beggars can’t be choosers. It’s really good of the Aussie military to lend us this place at such short notice.’

  But if the surroundings were shabby, the equipment was clearly state of the art. Tiny computers with large flat screens sat underneath a row of huge screens, one of which was showing a continuous loop of shots of Diamond Island, from the air, from the sea and even from inside the huts.

  On the opposite side of the shed, radar and sonar equipment were bleeping gently as they surveyed the surrounding waters. A printer was spewing out an endless stream of paper covered in what looked like map co-ordinates, and, high above them, lodged underneath the corrugated iron roof, Cate spotted the continuous movement of surveillance cameras.

  At the far end of the shed, a small section had been walled off to form a couple of small offices. Henri led the way, stopping only to ask a woman if she could bring them some breakfast.

  The woman nodded, then looked at Cate, clearly taken aback to see a teenager with her boss.

  She doesn’t know what I’m doing here or who I am, Cate realised. Whatever it is that Marcus and Henri have in mind for me, they haven’t told their colleagues about it.

  The three of them walked into a small office, and Marcus shut the door firmly behind them. ‘Sit down, Cate,’ he said, gesturing to a grey office chair. ‘We just wanted to bring you up to speed on a couple of things, plus we owe you an apology. We should have been, how shall I put it – a little bit clearer about our personnel policy when we recruited you to help on the animal smuggling case last summer.’ He sighed. ‘The truth is, Cate, like it or not, once an IMIA agent, always an IMIA agent. When an assignment has ended you can’t just go back out into the civilian world as if nothing has happened. You might need further debriefing, for example, or, heaven forbid, some protection. We were dealing with some pretty heavy criminals in the summer after all and we’d hate you and your family to suffer because of your bravery. So, to cut a long story short, we’ve been keeping a friendly eye on you. An insurance policy for us and for you. That’s all.’

  ‘Spying on me,’ grumbled Cate. She wasn’t sure she liked the way this conversation was going. ‘So have you bugged my bedroom? Got people listening in to my mobile calls?’ Her face burnt as she thought what the faceless IMIA agents would make of the nonsense she spouted with her girlfriends most nights as they chatted away about TV shows or gossiped about the latest celebrity stories on the internet.

  ‘Cate!’ Henri sat down on a large chair behind the heavy oak desk. ‘Of course we wouldn’t do that. That would be outrageous. And against the law. You deserve privacy. No, it was far less complicated than that. You’re on a passport alert list. That’s all. Perfectly standard. As soon as your passport was scanned at Heathrow airport we knew that you were on your way to Sydney. Then, I admit, we did check up on your phone records and discovered you’d been taking a few calls from somewhere quite close to the Friday Islands. That was when our ears really pricked up, I must say. But we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves. Ah, here’s breakfast. Marcus, will you serve?’

  As Marcus put sizzling bacon and sausages onto plates and poured freshly squeezed orange juice into tall frosted glasses, Cate tried to compose herself. She wasn’t really that surprised to learn that the IMIA had been keeping tabs on her. Last summer had been an education, not least in learning how a secretive organisation operated. Indeed, the IMIA didn’t seem to exist. It didn’t appear on the internet and, although Cate had twice visited their underground base in the South of France, she had never been told of the location of any others. Marcus and his colleagues, mostly ex-SAS or counter-intelligence, operated entirely independent of government interference, working without formal regulation or control, doing the jobs that other better known investigative agencies couldn’t or wouldn’t touch. Admittedly this meant that they sometimes bent the rules – recruiting a school kid to spy for example – but from what she had seen, the IMIA got results. One thing was certain: if both Marcus and Henri had made the journey all the way from Europe then something pretty big had to be going on.

  ‘Better?’ asked Marcus kindly as Cate finished off the last of her bacon sandwich and turned to the plate of croissants. While she was wolfing down her food, Henri had been bustling around switching on a computer and, up on the wall behind him, a cupboard door was sliding slowly open to reveal a large screen.

  ‘Right, Cate,’ he said briskly. ‘If you don’t mind giving us a few minutes of your time we’d just like to talk a few things through with you.’

  Not waiting for an answer, he waved a remote control towards the TV screen which flickered into life. ‘South America.’ An arrow began to move across the screen. ‘And see this country?’ The arrow came to rest on a tiny strip of land, sandwiched between the borders of Brazil, Columbia and Venezuela.

  Cate shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Don’t know it.’

  ‘Well, not surprising,’ said Marcus, opening up a black glossy laptop and powering it up. ‘Not many people do. It’s Cotia, a tiny state, smaller than Wales. It used to belong to Columbia but broke away after a bloody war and formed its own government, which is now effectively a dictatorship. It has no minerals, no natural resources to speak of, and for the first thirty years of its existence, Cotia was completely poverty-stricken, almost totally dependent on foreign aid. But suddenly, in the last ten years or so, it has zoomed up the economic league and is now one of the wealthiest countries in the developing world. Why, Cate, do you think that is?’

  Cate looked up at the map. ‘Well, bearing in mind its location, right next to Columbia and not too far from Mexico, I should say either drug smuggling, gun running or money laundering. Possibly a mixture of all three.’

  ‘Spot on,’ said Henri triumphantly. ‘Today Cotia is ruled by five different families who have, after a bloody turf war, signed a truce which basically carves up the country between them. Each family specialised in something. The Garcias took on the money laundering in the north of the country, the Ibanez in the south,
the Gutierrez family control gun smuggling into Columbia while the Lopez clan have the exclusive on Venezuela, and the Torres are heavily involved in the drug trade. Because the government is so corrupt, criminals from all the surrounding countries come in and out of the country pretty much unchallenged, to launder their money, buy guns and set up drug deals. But the Cotians are more than a match for them. They are the hardest, most ruthless bunch out there. Even the Columbians are wary of them. They have a saying, “Never turn your back on a Cotian or he will steal your kidneys”.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Cate. ‘Not good.’

  Henri looked directly at Cate. ‘Last year a Mexican judge and his entire family, including his elderly parents and young children, died when their private jet was shot down over Cotian airspace. He had been brought into the country to preside over a tax evasion trial involving the Gutierrez family. They never did find anyone to take his place.’

  ‘God,’ said Cate shaking her head. ‘How awful. Henri, Marcus, this is incredible stuff, but what exactly has it got to do with me?’

  There was silence. Somewhere in the room a mosquito was buzzing angrily.

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ said Marcus at last.

  Henri nodded gratefully.

  ‘Cate, as you can imagine, along with the CIA, Mossad and MI6, the IMIA have been keeping a very close eye on these families. We can’t control what goes on inside Cotia itself, but maybe we can prevent the tentacles from reaching over the borders to other countries we’re helping. And up until now we haven’t had too much to worry about on that account. The Cotian families have concentrated on building up their empires at home, consolidating their loyalties and taking out their enemies.’ His laptop bleeped and he hit a few buttons then pushed the screen over to Cate. ‘But three weeks ago this guy arrived at Sydney airport.’

  Cate stared at a picture of a young man with dark curly hair, wearing sunglasses and carrying a small, expensive looking suitcase. He looked suave, urbane, a businessman. Cate would never have thought of him as a crook.