Codename: The Tickler Read online

  Phelm is always covered from head to toe in dripping green ooze, and legend says that he is the only slime beast ever to have survived outside the gloopy waters of the fabled black lagoon.

  “Follow me…” he said.

  Saturday 0855 hours: MP1 Headquarters, London, UK

  Fangs and I followed Phlem through the maze of corridors that make up MP1 Headquarters, careful to avoid slipping on the slimy footprints he left behind. I wasn’t sure where he was taking us. Fangs had retrieved his remote control from Cube when we left the lab, and he was fiddling with it as we walked.

  “This is a copy of what Snores stole in South Africa,” Phlem said, opening his hand to reveal a small red tablet. It seemed to glow slightly, as though lit from within. “It’s called a Will Pill. It overrides the self-control of anyone who swallows it and allows others to direct their actions. It is currently loaded with my voice, so if you swallow this Will Pill, you’ll do everything I tell you to until the pill passes out the other end.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  Fangs pressed a button on the Bloodhound. There was a CRACK! as the two halves of the Will Pill split apart in Phlem’s hand. “Oops.”

  “It appears I’ll also be able to show you how it works, thanks to Agent Enigma,” Phlem glugged. “This” – he gestured to a microscopic circuit board inside – “sends electrical impulses to the brain. They are linked to a pre-programmed voice pattern, mine at present, as I said. I had Cube programme it in earlier. The model Snores has stolen is far more advanced, however, and can have an unlimited number of command voices installed.”

  “What’s it for?” asked Fangs.

  “The pill was designed jointly by the British and South African governments,” Phlem explained. “We plan to use it to ‘encourage’ foreign agents to work on our behalf, albeit temporarily and against their wishes.”

  “If something like this should fall into the wrong hands, sir…”

  “Exactly, Agent Brown,” said Phlem. “That’s why we had you apprehend Snores before he could sell the Will Pill on. We want to know who’s prepared to buy this technology and what they plan to do with it.”

  “You think he stole the pill to order?” I asked.

  “That’s our guess,” said Phlem, “although this is a top-secret project. How anyone outside MP1 even knows of its existence is a mystery.”

  “Can’t we just feed this pill to Snores and order him to tell us who he stole it for?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, Agent Brown, while the Will Pill’s toughened shell allows it to pass unharmed through a human’s digestive system, the acids bubbling away inside an ogre’s stomach are simply too vicious. We’d be waving goodbye to thousands of pounds’ worth of delicate equipment.”

  “I can see how that would be hard to stomach,” quipped Fangs, tucking his remote control away. “As is the entire concept. There’s no pill in the world that could make me do something I didn’t want to.”

  “I suspected that might be your reaction, Agent Enigma,” said Phlem, snapping the two halves of the pill back together, “which is why I’m willing to provide a practical demonstration – at a considerable cost to the lab, I might add.”

  We had stopped in front of a steel door at the end of the corridor and Phlem swiped his security pass against the sensor beside it. We stepped out of Headquarters onto a busy street.

  Businessmen clutched briefcases as they strode by, a lollipop lady showed school children across a zebra crossing and customers milled in and out of a nearby bank. Dotted among the humans were witches, skeletons, gnomes and other supernatural characters. People were so used to seeing creatures like us nowadays, that the sight of a vampire, werewolf and a slime beast chatting together hardly raised an eyebrow.

  Phlem produced a packet of jelly beans from his pocket and dropped the Will Pill on top of the sweets. Then he approached the lollipop lady.

  “Morning, Janice,” he said amiably, eating a couple of the sweets himself. “Busy day?”

  “Busy as ever, ducky,” the lollipop lady replied. “And there’s a bit of a chill in the air, too.”

  “There certainly is,” said Phlem. “You make sure you stay wrapped up.” Then he held the bag of sweets out. “Jelly bean?”

  “Ooh, don’t mind if I do,” said Janice, dipping her hand into the bag. I could tell from the way Phlem was holding it that he was making sure she would choose the Will Pill. I caught sight of a flash of red as she popped the pill into her mouth. “Do you know, even in winter some of the kids—”

  The lollipop lady froze and the pupils of her eyes grew wide, as though someone had flicked an “off” switch in her brain.

  “Janice,” said Phlem calmly, “I want you to go into the bank over there and steal a thousand pounds.”

  Without so much as a blink, Janice turned and strode into the bank. We followed her inside. She walked straight up to the nearest cashier.

  “This is a robbery!” she screeched, whipping off her fluorescent yellow cap and pushing it through the gap beneath the cashier’s window. “Put one thousand pounds in that hat or else.”

  Instantly, alarm bells began to ring and metal shutters slammed down, protecting the cashiers and – more importantly – their money.

  “That’s unbelievable,” I said.

  Fangs, however, remained unconvinced. “Nothing but an illusion,” he said. “I’ll put a stop to it.”

  “You can’t, Agent Enigma,” bubbled Phlem. “The Will Pill is tuned to my voice pattern alone.”

  “Then stand back and watch my voice patterns at work,” said Fangs. “I think you’ll find them more effective than any pill…”

  He took one of Janice’s hands and spun her round, catching her in his arms. “Why don’t you leave this life of crime behind and join me for some good food, excellent wine and burning romance?”

  Janice gazed up into my boss’s eyes for a moment, then raised her metal lollipop in the air and brought it down onto his head with a

  CLANG!

  “I stand corrected,” groaned Fangs as he staggered back to join us. “The Will Pill does work, after all.”

  “And Snores is due to sell one this evening,” said Phlem. “We’ll have someone making the drop in his place, and you two will be waiting to pounce once the deal is done.”

  Police sirens could be heard approaching in the distance.

  “Er … will Janice be all right, sir?” I asked.

  Phlem nodded. “I’ll get a clean-up team down here to sort everything out. They’ll flush the Will Pill out of her system and she’ll be back at her zebra crossing by the time school ends.”

  Phlem was interrupted by a voice coming from my mouth. Just like Fangs, my front teeth had been equipped with state-of-the-art blue-tooth communication technology, and technician XD was using it to contact me. “We’re almost through to the Mini, Miss Brown,” he said.

  Back in the lab, the technicians were cutting away the last chunk of fake elephant dung. The sound of snoring was louder than ever now and clearly audible over the rasp of the chainsaw.

  Nearby, Cube was repairing the laser comb on a workbench. “I’ve almost fixed it,” he shouted over the noise. “No thanks to Fangs Enigma, of course.”

  Before Fangs could answer, the door to the lab swished open and … Cube stepped into the room. “How’s it going with the comb?” he called.

  My eyes flicked from one Cube to the other. “How? Wh-what?” I stuttered.

  Suddenly, the Cube at the workbench began to change. His skin rippled, like the surface of a pond after you’ve tossed in a pebble. His face, hair and clothes all rearranged themselves until there was a beautiful young woman with bobbed blonde hair standing before us.

  “Holly!” exclaimed Fangs.

  “Holly?” I said. “You’re Agent Holly Delta?”

  “The fastest shapeshifter in the business.” Holly smiled and shook my hand. She turned to my boss. “Good to see you again, Fangs. It’s been a while.”
>
  Fangs whipped off his sunglasses and smoothed back his hair. He was engaging in what I’ve come to call his “chat-up mode”.

  “Too long,” he crooned. “What say we catch up over dinner this evening?”

  Holly adjusted Fangs’s shirt collar. “I have very expensive tastes, and I doubt you could afford to keep me in the manner to which I plan to become accustomed. But we will be together this evening. I’m taking Snores’s place at the handover.”

  Fangs kissed the back of Holly’s hand. “Until tonight, then.”

  I rolled my eyes as my boss slinked over to the other side of the lab. Chuckling, Holly turned back to carry on her work on the comb. She soldered wires into place on the tiny circuit board.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” I asked.

  “Which one?” said Holly. “Repair laser combs or deal with Fangs Enigma?”

  I tried not to smile. “The comb thing.”

  “I started out as a lab technician,” she said, firing the laser beam at a nearby target to test it was working. “Once they discovered I was a shapeshifter, though, they figured I was more useful to them out in the field.”

  Behind us, there was a

  THUD!

  and the two halves of elephant dung split open to reveal Snores and his yellow Mini. Snores was fast asleep. I hoped he’d stay like that while we searched him for the Will Pill. It would be easier that way.

  “Stand back!” said Fangs, rolling up his sleeves. “I’m the senior agent here. I should be the one to retrieve the Will Pill. Now where is it?”

  Technician XD ran a hand scanner over the car, and up and down Snores’s body. The sensor began to beep as soon as it was held near the ogre’s massive metal nose. “It’s in there, sir,” he said.

  Fangs paused. “On second thoughts, I can’t take all the credit for stopping Snores. And it would be good experience for Puppy to conduct the search…”

  “Thanks a lot, boss,” I said, stepping up to the sleeping ogre. This wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  I thrust my claw up Snores’s right nostril. It was filled with gooey, crusty bogies and I hoped that I wouldn’t have to search the other nostril. But then, I felt something that wasn’t a bogey. I hooked the end of my nail around the solid lump and pulled it free.

  There, in the centre of my hairy palm, covered in thick, green snot, was a red, glowing Will Pill.

  Saturday 1219 hours: MP1 Private Jet, 30,000 Feet

  Fangs set the autopilot to maintain current speed and altitude and left the cockpit of the jet to join Holly and me in the cabin, where he poured himself his favourite drink – a glass of milk with a tiny drop of human blood. Then he took the Bloodhound remote from his cape and pointed it at the glass. “Now,” he muttered, “it has to work this time.”

  He hit a button.

  SCREECH!

  Alarms blared from the cockpit as the autopilot was disabled, and the jet began to dive. I stood up to fix it, but was forced back into my seat as another sharp burst of toothache hit me. Holly rolled her eyes at Fangs and hurried to the controls to get us back on course. The plane levelled out a few moments later.

  Cube’s team had found an encrypted message, probably given to Snores by the buyer, in the glove compartment of his car. It had taken a little decoding, but MP1 now had the exact details of the drop:

  Parking Lot, East 12th Street,

  New York. 10 p.m., Sunday 29

  March. $200,000. Caramel Cole.

  “Do we know any more about this Caramel Cole?” asked Fangs.

  I fired up my laptop as Holly rejoined us. “I’ve got a call from Cube coming in now. Maybe he can give us more details.”

  A second window opened up on my laptop screen, this time of a page from an Internet video-hosting site. The footage playing showed a ringmaster in a tatty, red suit and silver top hat. The man was in his early forties with greying hair and a potbelly that hung over his belt. He was standing in the middle of a circus ring as four white horses galloped in a circle around him.

  “Caramel Cole is a small-time circus owner based in Connecticut,” said Cube over the video. “He started out selling toffee apples – or ‘candy apples’, as Americans call them – at state fairs, hence the nickname ‘Caramel Cole’. Eventually, he saved up enough money to buy a second-hand big top, and he took his own circus on the road, hoping to be the next great showman, along the lines of P. T. Barnum. Unfortunately, shoddy acts and low audience numbers have meant that his show has remained somewhat second-rate.”

  “You can say that again,” said Holly.

  On screen, the horses were leaving the ring and a beautiful girl with jet-black hair dashed on. She was dressed in a sparkling bikini and was clutching a pair of long, lethal-looking swords.

  “This is Wanda Howe,” said Cube. “A young lady with a remarkable skill.”

  Wanda dropped to one knee, threw her head back and lowered the sharp tip of the sword into her open mouth. She swallowed it bit by bit until only the handle was visible.

  “Just your type, Fangs,” said Holly with a smile. “If she can swallow swords, she might just be able to swallow your chat-up lines without choking.”

  I closed the video screen to reveal Cube’s angular head. “I still don’t understand. Why would a small-time circus owner like Caramel Cole want to get his hands on a Will Pill?”

  “I guess that’s what you’ll need to find out tomorrow,” said Cube.

  Sunday 2153 hours: East 12th Street, New York, USA

  Fangs pulled the unmarked MP1 car up to the kerb opposite a large, well-maintained apartment building. “This is the place,” he said.

  I checked the latest message from HQ on my laptop. “Phlem says that to avoid suspicion we shouldn’t agree to sell the pill for anything less than two hundred thousand dollars.”

  Holly whistled appreciatively from the back seat. “Two hundred thousand. Imagine what we could do with that much money.”

  Fangs turned to smile seductively at Holly. “We could run away together and sip exotic cocktails in a tropical paradise.”

  Holly closed her eyes and sighed. “Sounds wonderful, apart from the fact that you’d be there with me.” She jumped out of the car. “Come on, time to get into position.”

  “So our little love game continues…” said Fangs, gazing after her.

  We crossed the road and entered the car park beneath the apartment building. Once inside, blocked from view by a large four-by-four, Holly closed her eyes and gradually her skin grew thicker and turned grey. Her teeth became dirty stumps, and her nose took on the dull glint of rusting metal. She opened her eyes, which were now flooded with blood-red veins – and the illusion was complete.

  “Incredible,” I whispered, peering up at what was now an identical copy of Snores. “His own mum would never know the difference.”

  “Have you got the Will Pill?” Fangs asked.

  Holly opened her fist to reveal the tiny, glowing tablet. It looked smaller than ever, nestled in her giant, grey palm.

  “Keep it safe,” said Fangs. “Or you could just swallow it now, and I’ll tell you where to meet me for dinner.”

  “Only if I can come looking like this,” said Holly, her voice now low and gruff.

  “Maybe we’d better stick to the plan for the time being,” Fangs said.

  Holly gave me a sly wink and ambled off, just as a vehicle turned off the road and entered the car park.

  “Looks like we’re on,” said Fangs, stepping into the shadows and drawing his cloak around him.

  A tiny, bubble-shaped car, painted with multicoloured flowers, passed between the spots where Fangs and I were hiding and drove into the darkness of the car park. Its engine made a comical CHUCK-AH, CHUCK-AH, CHUCK-AH! sound, punctuated by the occasional AWOO-GAH! from the car’s horn.

  I strapped on my night-vision goggles. The shadows melted away, revealing that the car had pulled up next to Holly. A man with grey hair and a potbelly climbed out. I tapped my tooth to open up
a line of communication with Fangs. “It’s him,” I hissed. “Caramel Cole.”

  “Has he got any muscle with him?” Fangs asked.

  “It doesn’t look like it. No one else could fit inside that car.” I paused, blinking as a second figure emerged from the tiny vehicle – and then a third. “I think my night-vision goggles might be faulty,” I hissed. “Cole’s henchmen look distorted.”

  “Distorted?”

  “They’ve both got huge, floppy feet and round noses, and they’re grinning like someone’s painted their smiles in place.” I zoomed in for a better look. “Wait! Their smiles are painted in place. They’re clowns!”

  “Funny way to do business,” quipped Fangs. “Has Cole got the money?”

  I watched as Holly held out her hand to reveal the tiny Will Pill. Caramel Cole nodded to one of the clowns, who took a thick envelope from under his hat.

  “This is it,” I said. “He’s handing over the—”

  BANG!

  There was a noise like the crack of a whip and a blinding flash of light. My night-vision goggles flared white and I pulled them off, blinking.

  “That sounded like a gunshot!” I cried. “Can you see Holly? All I can see are swirling green shapes.”

  Before Fangs could reply, there was the sound of doors slamming and an engine starting.

  “Something’s gone wrong!” I yelled.

  As the car raced towards us, Fangs leapt out of his hiding place. He landed with a THUD! on the roof of the car and stretched himself over the windscreen, grabbing onto the wipers to avoid sliding off. The car swerved first left, then right as the driver tried to dislodge him – but Fangs clung on tight. Then one of the clowns leaned out of the window and hurled a custard pie.

  It hit Fangs full in the face, and he was thrown from the car. He crashed to the ground, rolling over and over until he collided with a concrete pillar.