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up.”
    “Spider-Man, eh?”
    “Angel said you should also know your arm’s got a GPS chip in it – like a SatNav but much more precise. It’s called an inertial navigation system.”
    “So Unit Red can spy on me?”
    “It’s for your own safety. We’ll know where to find you if there’s a problem. On top of that, you can log on with a brain implant if you get lost and it’ll tell you
exactly where you are. You shouldn’t get lost, though, because it’ll guide you wherever you want to go.”
    Jordan asked, “Do you listen in to what I say as well?”
    Kate shook her head. “No microphones. Angel thought you wouldn’t appreciate it.”
    “He’s right.”
    “Back to the case,” Kate said. “Where are you going to kick off?”
    Jordan stopped himself from saying, “At home.” After all, the Unit Red house in Highgate Cemetery was his home now. Instead, he answered, “Lower Stoke.”

 
4 MEDWAY PIRATES
    It seemed a lifetime away. In a sense, it was. A little more than a year earlier, Jordan Stryker had been ordinary Ben Smith, living in a small Medway town that had not yet
been wrecked by the Thames Estuary explosion. Ben Smith had not yet been killed by the same blast. He’d got into about as much trouble as anyone else in school, he hadn’t been top or
bottom of his class, he’d been the brightest young tennis talent in the area, he’d played drums in a group and he’d had a best friend called Amy Goss. Among the older boys Ben
knew was Merrick Breeze.
    Made unrecognizable by surgery and the passage of time, Jordan walked anonymously down All Hallows Road until he came to the familiar sports centre. He didn’t go inside, though. He walked
straight past. On the other side, there was a wooden shed. It was large and sturdy, but still a shed. Since the Thames explosion, it had housed the local community radio station.
    Before the blast, the outfit had been pirate broadcasters. Harassed by the police, the Medway Pirates had been forced to uproot themselves and move in secret from place to place. They had never
been busted because Merrick Breeze had hacked into the local police computer and he’d always alerted them when a raid was about to happen. At once, volunteers had shifted the illegal gear to
the next hideout. The police had found themselves scratching their heads in an empty room each time.
    Merrick had also been popular with the local gangland boss, Mr. Goss – or, as Ben Smith knew him, Amy’s dad. Mr. Goss had always funded the radio station and looked after Merrick in
return for the opportunity to snoop on the police. Ben had never told his mum, Detective Sergeant Smith, what Merrick was doing because he’d not wanted to get a popular boy into trouble and
he’d enjoyed the music that the pirates used to pump out. Anyway, it would not have been a good idea to make an enemy of Mr. Goss.
    Now, as a Unit Red agent, Jordan intended to exploit his knowledge of the shared history of the radio station, Merrick and Mr. Goss. He knocked on the shed door and pushed it open with his left
hand. Putting his head inside, he said, “Can I come in?”
    “Yes,” a big guy replied in a quiet voice. “What are you after?”
    “Merrick,” Jordan answered, stepping into the shed with its clutter of shelves, audio equipment, papers and CDs. In the far corner, a small area was partitioned off mostly with
floor-to-ceiling windows. Through the glass, Jordan could see a DJ and a guest talking into microphones. Their interview came into the main room through speakers attached to the wall.
    The producer adjusted his baseball cap and jerked his thumb towards a door on the opposite side of the shed. It looked as if it led into a broom cupboard. “Are you one of his
mates?”
    “Sort of. Mr. Goss sent me.”
    He nodded abruptly. “You’d better go in.”
    As always, Merrick was hunched over a computer keypad. Jordan recognized him at once but Merrick stared back blankly.
    “Hi,” Jordan said,