Higher Institute of Villainous Education (6 page)

‘This place is probably the nearest thing you’ll get to any privacy round here, so make the most of it. The computers you can see on the desks are directly interfaced with Big Blue – sorry,’ Tahir apologised, noting the momentary looks of confusion on some of their faces, ‘that’s what some of us call H.I.V.E.mind. Then you’ve got your closets. Hang your uniform in your wardrobe each night and you’ll find a clean one there in the morning. And before you ask, no, I don’t know how they get in to change them without anyone ever noticing. They just seem to materialise.’

Interesting, Otto thought.

‘Then you’ve got your beds and through the other door your bathroom. I’m not going to explain how everything works in there. You’re all Alphas, not grunts, so I shouldn’t have to.’ Otto detected more than a hint of smugness, arrogance, even, in the way that Tahir said this. He seemed just a little too proud to be wearing the black uniform.

‘All the rooms are the same so most of us make some attempt to liven them up a bit. Just one piece of advice, don’t paint anything. The janitor tends to get upset about that and you don’t want to upset him, believe me.’ He stepped back out of the room and the door slid shut behind him automatically. ‘All the doors are keyed to these palm readers.’ He indicated the panel he had placed his hand on a few moments before. ‘So there’s no need for keys, which is good because it’s unlikely you’re going to lose your right hand. At least not in your first year, anyway . . .’ Worryingly, Tahir didn’t appear to be joking.

‘Use your Blackboxes to find out from H.I.V.E.mind which room is yours and who your room-mate will be. You’ve got about an hour before dinner so take this time to have a look around. If you need any help, you can usually find me somewhere around the atrium or you can just give me a call on your box. OK, that’s about it for now. I’ve got to get moving or I’ll miss Grappletag practice. Good luck.’ He winked at the assembled group and strode away down the balcony.

Several of those around Otto pulled out their Blackboxes and queried H.I.V.E.mind about which room they had been assigned. Otto followed suit, flipping the device open.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Malpense. How may I be of assistance?’ the blue face enquired.

‘Good afternoon to you too, H.I.V.E.mind. I need to know which room I have been assigned, please,’ Otto replied.

‘You are assigned to accommodation area seven, room 4.7. Will there be anything else?’ H.I.V.E.mind asked. ‘No, that’s all for now. Thanks, H.I.V.E.mind.’ The blue face disappeared.

Otto noticed that Wing was also checking his Black-box and as he talked to the machine a broad grin spread across his face. He noticed Otto looking at him.

‘It appears we are to be room-mates, Otto,’ he said, still smiling.

‘I hope you don’t snore,’ Otto laughed.

‘Like a chainsaw, my friend, like a chainsaw,’ Wing replied, grinning.

Room 4.7 was exactly the same as the room they had been shown, just as Tahir had said it would be. Otto sat at his desk, idly flicking through one of the neatly stacked textbooks. Studying their titles, Otto doubted that they were set texts at any other school in the world.
Deathtraps: Their Use and Care, Effective Threats, Elementary Evil, Global Domination: What You Need to Know!, A Beginner’s Guide to Doomsday Weapons
and several others that he’d not yet had a chance to look at.

Wing sat on his bed studying his Blackbox intently.

‘Well, what have we got tomorrow, then?’ Otto asked.

‘The first lesson is Villainy Studies with . . .’ Wing checked the machine again, ‘Dr Nero. Well that should at least be an
interesting
start to the day.’

Otto raised an eyebrow at his new room-mate.

‘Then what?’

Wing checked the Blackbox again. ‘Then we have Tactical Education with Colonel Francisco. That’s followed by Practical Technology with Professor Pike first thing after lunch and then Stealth and Evasion with Ms Leon.’

‘Sounds like a highly educational first day. I can hardly wait to get started.’ Otto grinned, placing the textbook he’d been leafing through back on the desk. He moved over and sat on his own bed facing Wing. Beckoning him to lean closer, he said softly, ‘We have to get out of here, off this island, as soon as possible.’

Wing frowned slightly. ‘Agreed. H.I.V.E. is certainly impressive, but I have no desire to spend the next few years of my life as a virtual prisoner.’

‘My sentiments exactly,’ replied Otto, nodding. ‘The problem is how. I’ve not seen any sign of an exit to the surface and I’ve been looking for one all day.’

‘As have I, but even if we were to find an exit, what would we do once we got to the surface? I doubt that we would be given enough time to construct a raft.’

‘We might not need to. Did you notice the sign pointing to the submarine pen earlier?’ Otto asked, his voice dropping to a whisper. He’d searched the room thoroughly as soon as the door had closed but he still wasn’t sure if the room was bugged or not. It looked clean, but until he knew for certain, he had decided that he would work on the assumption that any unguarded conversations should not be treated as private.

Wing looked at Otto carefully and replied in a whisper, ‘Yes, I saw it, but are you seriously proposing that we use a stolen submarine as our escape vehicle? How would we pilot it? Somehow I suspect that requests for submariner lessons will arouse a certain amount of suspicion.’

‘I could do it, I don’t need lessons,’ Otto said calmly.

‘You know how to pilot a submarine?’ Wing arched one eyebrow.

‘No, but I’m a quick learner,’ Otto replied with a slight smile.

‘You would have to be. You’ll forgive me if I choose not to stake my life on your ability to improvise.’ Wing seemed almost irritated that Otto was suggesting something so ridiculous.

Otto suspected that Wing probably thought he was losing his mind. He could understand his disbelief, but Otto knew that if he could get a couple of uninterrupted minutes to examine any vehicle he’d be able to pilot it. Assuming that it was physically possible for one person to do it of course, but they would cross that bridge when they came to it. The problem would be convincing Wing that he could do it. ‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing’ wasn’t going to cut it when he was effectively asking his new friend to put his life in his hands.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t really matter until we get some idea of what the security around the submarine pen is like,’ Otto said. ‘The fact that it’s so openly signposted means that our hosts are confident that it’s secure.’

Wing nodded. ‘Indeed, security is clearly taken quite seriously around here.’

That was something of an understatement. There had seemingly been security cameras in the corner of every room during the tour. Steel spheres, the size of a tennis ball with a single black eye surrounded by blue LEDs, intended presumably to remind students that these were the eyes of the all-seeing H.I.V.E.mind. A person would have to be invisible to make their way around H.I.V.E. undetected, or may be . . . Otto felt a familiar tingling as the seed of a plan began to germinate in his head.

‘Well, let’s just keep our eyes and ears open for now and see if any other opportunities present themselves. Anyway,’ continued Otto, ‘I haven’t thanked you properly for saving my skin at lunch today. I’m not sure what I’d have done without your help.’

‘You seemed to be handling the situation quite admirably,’ Wing replied. ‘You certainly subdued your first assailant efficiently.’

‘You just have to know which buttons to press,’ Otto smiled. ‘Or, more accurately, what vulnerable clusters of sensitive nerve-endings to press.’

‘I fear we may have drawn unwelcome attention with our actions. Dr Nero did not seem pleased,’ said Wing, frowning slightly.

Otto knew what Wing meant. Otto rarely met people who he truly considered to be his equal, so when he did it meant that they were people to be added to the pile marked ‘Dangerous’. At the moment Dr Nero was right at the top of that pile. Otto would have to discreetly find out as much as he possibly could about Nero without attracting his closer attention. He felt certain that you didn’t want to be top of the Doctor’s ‘Things to Do’ list. Unbidden a mental image formed in Otto’s head of a giant Dr Nero using a magnifying glass to focus the burning rays of the sun on to a little white-haired ant. He dismissed the disturbing image from his mind and rose from the bed. ‘Well, here’s hoping that we don’t have a repeat performance at dinner. Speaking of which, we’d better get going or we’ll be late.’

Wing hadn’t been joking about the snoring. Otto lay in his bed with a hastily fashioned toilet-paper plug in each ear. He could no longer hear Wing, but he swore he could feel his bed vibrating slightly.

Dinner had thankfully passed uneventfully. Block and Tackle had been there but they’d been seated at a distant table with a group of similarly hulking brutes, all of them wearing the same blue henchman overalls. Save for a couple of murderous stares when either Wing or Otto had inadvertently caught their eye they had steered well clear of the new recruits. The security guards patrolling the cavern probably had something to do with that. It also became clear that the staff did not eat dinner with the students since the top table had remained empty throughout the course of the meal. Otto wondered what their evening dining arrangements might be.

After dinner he and Wing had spent a couple of hours exploring the accommodation block’s facilities. This had included an abortive game of darts which was abandoned after Wing hit nine bull’s-eyes in a row. The more time Otto spent with Wing the more the large, well-spoken Asian boy surprised him. He had tried gently probing Wing for more details of his background but when Wing had seemed reluctant to discuss the topic Otto had dropped it, not wanting his curiosity to damage the friendship that was developing between them. After all, if they didn’t come up with a plan and do something about their current situation they’d have six long years to find out all about each other.

The plan that Otto was nurturing was still slowly forming in his mind, but the more he concentrated on it the more elusive the details seemed. He knew that he had to just stop consciously thinking about it and over time the problems with the scheme would resolve themselves, but he was impatient – he felt trapped.

As he lay in bed, blissfully deaf to the ungodly noise coming from Wing’s side of the room, he found himself mentally going over the events of the weeks leading up to his arrival at H.I.V.E. Looking back on it now, he supposed it had all started with the letter . . .

.

Chapter Five

‘They can’t do this!’ Otto shouted, waving at the letter that lay on the desk in front of him. ‘I’ve spent years getting this place running just right, and now this!’

He stood up from the battered leather office chair behind his desk and paced around the room. The old attic where he stood was lined with shelves full of books and the scattered remains of hundreds of different electronic devices. Standing in the centre of the room was a middle-aged woman in an expensive suit. Her red eyes betrayed the fact she had been crying recently.

‘Oh, I just don’t know what to do, Mr Malpense. I brought you the letter as soon as I read it. These horrible people are going to close the orphanage down and there’s nothing we can do. I’ve spent my whole life working here and I just don’t know what will become of me if they close it down . . . oh, Mr Malpense, this is terrible.’ With great heaving sobs, she burst into tears again.

Otto put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs McReedy, I’ll think of something. They needn’t think that they’re shutting us down without a fight. St Sebastian’s isn’t finished yet.’ He handed Mrs McReedy a hankie from his pocket and she proceeded to blow her nose explosively.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Malpense, but you know how worried I get about these things.’ She sniffed and dabbed at the corners of her eyes with the hankie. ‘And it’s not that I don’t have faith in you, but that letter seems so final. I just don’t see what we can do.’

Otto picked up the letter from the desk again and, scanned its contents. There was a lot of overblown language and official-sounding jargon, but it all boiled down to just one thing. St Sebastian’s orphanage was to be closed down in two weeks’ time and that was the local council’s final decision. There was mention of missed performance targets and restructuring of local childcare provision but these just sounded like excuses to Otto. They were going to close HIS orphanage, and he had just a fortnight to persuade them otherwise.

He had arrived at St Sebastian’s twelve years before, left in a cradle on the doorstep in the middle of the night with no form of identification except a single piece of white card with the handwritten name Otto Malpense on it. The staff of the orphanage were used to dealing with these kinds of situations and had gone through the usual motions of reporting the nocturnal delivery to the police in the hope that they might be able to track down Otto’s parents. The search, however, had proved fruitless; there was not a trace to be found of whoever had abandoned Otto on that dark, stormy night. So, there being no other place for him, the strange little white-haired baby had been taken in and St Sebastian’s had become his new home.

When Otto first arrived there, St Sebastian’s was a long way from being the most well-staffed or -equipped orphanage in London. It had been built over one hundred and fifty years previously and the tired old house showed many scars from its long years of busy occupation. Its ornate facsade was covered in ivy and the roof had clearly been patched many times over with whatever materials were immediately to hand. The interior of the building had just as many problems. The water pipes clanked and rumbled, the floors were uneven and creaky and it was too big and old to really keep it thoroughly clean so dust seemed to gather everywhere. The children’s dormitories were old-fashioned; each lined with steel-framed bunk beds and served by only one cramped, rusty bathroom for every twenty or thirty children. Many of the older sections of the building had proved to be too expensive to renovate over the years and so there were what seemed like miles of abandoned, dusty corridors that were rarely, if ever, used by anyone. Somehow St Sebastian’s had managed to avoid closure over the years, possibly because it was one of the only orphanages left in the area. Nevertheless, the money available to the orphanage had dwindled as the years went by and this had led to the accelerated decline of the grand old building. Indeed, the staff seemed to spend as much time carrying out makeshift repairs as they did looking after the children.

At first Otto had seemed to be quite a normal child, with the obvious exception of his unusually coloured hair, but as he got slightly older people had started to notice that there was something a little bit odd about him. At the age of three he taught himself to read. He sat on the floor of the common room staring for hours at several of the books that older children had left lying around, his face frozen in a look of intense concentration. The staff had thought this was highly amusing.

‘Look at him! He looks just like he’s reading,’ one of the staff would say.

‘Oh, he’s just copying what the other children do,’ another would reply.

But he wasn’t just imitating what he had seen other people do. As he sat staring at the letters on the page it was almost as if his brain just
understood
them. At first the words had meant nothing to him, but as he stared at the pages their meaning became clearer and clearer to him, as if the knowledge was somehow just growing in his head. Not only that but he could remember every last word of every page that he had looked at. It was as though his brain was sucking the knowledge, vampire-like, from the books.

Then there was the time, when he was five, that he had taken Mrs McReedy’s phone apart. It was not unusual for the children at St Sebastian’s to dismantle things like this, but Otto didn’t just take it apart. As he sat surrounded by the scattered components of the phone he could see exactly what each piece was supposed to do and how, when they were fitted back together correctly, their function could be improved. In fact when he did finally put the phone back together again it worked better than it ever had before. It wasn’t until two months later when the next phone bill arrived that Mrs McReedy realised that none of the calls she had made for the past eight weeks had cost her anything. She had queried this with the phone company who informed her that their systems didn’t make mistakes of that kind and she should stop wasting their time claiming that she had made calls when she clearly hadn’t.

When he was very young, before he started school, Otto spent many hours slowly exploring every nook and cranny of the mysterious old building. He had an uncanny knack for sneaking away unnoticed. He would sit down with the other pre-school children in the common room and appear to join in with their games. Then someone would call the member of staff away for a moment or their attention would wander for a few seconds and before they knew it Otto would have vanished. The first time that this happened it had triggered a full-scale panic as the staff of the orphanage turned the building upside down searching for him. Not a trace could be found anywhere of the little boy, despite a thorough search of the building and grounds. Mrs McReedy had been just about to call the police and officially report him missing when he had toddled back into the common room. He had been missing for several hours and was covered from head to toe in dust and grime. When asked where he had been all day he had given Mrs McReedy a puzzled look and replied, ‘Here.’ Further questioning had proven useless. Eventually, this became such a common occurrence with Otto that the staff gave up looking for him, knowing that he would eventually reappear, none the worse for his travels and surprised, irritated even, by their concern.

The staff of the orphanage weren’t the only people who witnessed Otto’s slightly odd behaviour. Just down the street from the orphanage was the library, one of the oldest and largest in London. Like St Sebastian’s, it was a grand old Gothic building that dated back hundreds of years and for Otto it soon felt like a second home. Mrs McReedy had given up trying to find new books in the orphanage for this strange little boy who read so quickly that it looked as if he was just checking the page numbers. So she would take him down to the library whenever she could where he would be placed in the charge of Mr Littleton, the librarian, a good friend of Mrs McReedy. Mr Littleton was happy to keep an eye on Otto for her the little boy was no trouble at all, he told her. He just sat flicking through the books all day, without a care in the world. Nobody, at least at first, believed that a child of Otto’s age could actually be reading and understanding the books at that speed.

But he was, though it wasn’t reading as most people understood it. In just the same way as when he learnt to read in the first place it was as if the knowledge contained within each book he read was leaping straight from the page into his brain. He couldn’t explain it, but the more he read the more he knew and the more he knew the better his understanding of what he had already read. And he read literally everything, from Tolkien to Tolstoy, from Sun Tzu to the Sunday Times, often choosing a specific section of the library each day and devouring whole bookcases without pausing. The staff at the library would joke with each other about the odd little boy who just sat on the floor, surrounded by piles of books and papers, pretending to read. Perhaps he’s not quite right in the head, they would say to each other, but at least he’s safe and happy here. All except Mr Littleton, who, over time, grew to realise that Otto
was
reading the books, absorbing them, almost. He tried to tell this to his colleagues but they just started to think that he was as odd as this strange little boy. Occasionally, when Mr Littleton happened upon Otto sitting in the aisles, he would stop, pluck a particular book from the shelves and hand it to him.

‘Don’t miss this one; you’ve got to read this.’

‘Thank you, Mr Littleton,’ Otto would reply each time, smiling at the elderly librarian with that peculiarly adult expression of his and adding the book to the top of one of the piles surrounding him.

All of which made traditional schooling rather irrelevant for Otto. The other orphans were normally sent for lessons at the local school but it quickly became clear that Otto was a little more advanced than his peers. His reading in the library had covered so many different subjects that by the time he was ten years old he had a better understanding of their subjects than most of his teachers. His teachers, for their part, had not taken kindly to being repeatedly corrected by a ten-year-old boy and eventually, inevitably, the headmaster of the school had formally complained to Mrs McReedy. So she in turn had summoned Otto to her office.

‘What am I going to do with you, Otto?’ she said, looking concerned.

‘Why, what’s the matter, Mrs McReedy?’ Otto replied, appearing genuinely uncertain what it was that he was supposed to have done.

She looked down at some papers on her desk. ‘It appears that some of your teachers . . . well,
all
of your teachers, actually, have been complaining that you’re disrupting classes. Is this true?’ She looked sternly at him.

‘Well, if you call exposing their woeful incompetence disruptive, then yes, I suppose I have.’ Otto stared back at her. Over the past few years Mrs McReedy had become increasingly used to Otto talking like this – clever but rude – and she could see how it would drive his teachers mad.

‘Otto, you are ten years old, you aren’t qualified to say whether or not your teachers are doing a good job. None of the other children have the problems that you do,’ she continued, looking slightly exasperated with him.

‘I’m not like the other children, you know that. They just take so long to understand everything that I get bored waiting. It’s not my fault if I’m better than them,’ Otto replied matter of factly. ‘I’ve already learnt everything that’s being covered in classes and I’m starting to wonder if I should even be there.’ He folded his arms defiantly.

‘Don’t be silly. Your education isn’t something you can just ignore, Otto. What are you going to do when you leave here if you don’t have any qualifications?’ Mrs McReedy couldn’t quite believe she was having this conversation with someone Otto’s age.

‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll think of something, Mrs McReedy.’ Otto knew that he didn’t need to worry about qualifications and exams. They were for normal children and he was already quite aware that he was far from normal.

‘So what do you suggest we do, then?’ she asked, secretly hoping that he would actually have a useful suggestion since she was struggling to come up with an answer herself. If Otto’s misbehaviour continued, he would be excluded from school and that would mean questions might be asked about her own care of the children.

‘You could be my teacher,’ Otto replied.

She gave him a condescending smile. ‘It’s a long time since I taught anyone, Otto, and if your teachers at school aren’t good enough for you what good would I be?’

‘Oh, I’m not suggesting that you actually try to teach me. I agree, that would be pointless. No, better just to say that you’re going to give me private tuition here at the orphanage, in order to keep up appearances,’ Otto said thoughtfully.