The Minders Read online

  Praise for The Passengers

  “I absolutely loved it. It sucked me right in and kept me gripped right until the end. With some real jaw-dropping moments, it was an edge-of-your-seat read.”

  —Claire Allan, USA Today bestselling author of Her Name Was Rose

  “Virtually every plot beat seems plausible and imminent. . . . Marrs laces his fast-paced tale with delectably mordant satire.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A fast-paced thriller that offers a discourse on morality and ethics. . . . Marrs excels at thrilling readers by creating a real sense of tension and delivering a believable, harsh criticism of modern society through this dark and entertaining story. Driving . . . will never feel quite the same.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “The Passengers is a 1970s disaster movie by way of Black Mirror. . . . If you’re looking for a sleek, exhilarating ride, look no further.”

  —Financial Times

  “One can almost hear the Hollywood music in the background as the action unfolds; the plot twists are truly gripping. . . . Summer blockbuster entertainment at its best. All that’s missing is a slo-mo pre-disaster montage.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “No one will want to ride in one of these cars after reading this terrifying thriller.”

  —Library Journal

  “Not only is John Marrs a master of the written word, but he is also a master of character development, story-line twists, suspense, relevance, intelligent writing, and the gift of creating something inherently unique.”

  —TotallyBookedBlog

  “Marrs is brilliant at twists, and for the addicts of adrenaline-fuelled twisty rides, this book really delivers the goods.”

  —Peter James, international bestselling author of Find Them Dead

  Praise for the other novels of John Marrs

  “Marrs’s engrossing, believable thriller raises intriguing questions about our science-tinged future.”

  —Booklist

  “Like a lengthy episode of the dark TV series Black Mirror . . . expertly written.”

  —Peterborough Telegraph

  “Engaging concept, craftily executed.”

  —Adrian J. Walker, international bestselling author of The End of the World Running Club

  “A modern-day What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? that is dark, twisted, and full of surprises.”

  —Mark Edwards, #1 bestselling author of Here to Stay and The Retreat

  “A tense, thrilling read—I found it impossible to put down. It’s dark and twisted, and I loved it!”

  —Alex Michaelides, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient

  NOVELS BY JOHN MARRS

  When You Disappeared

  Welcome to Wherever You Are

  The One

  The Good Samaritan

  Her Last Move

  The Passengers

  What Lies Between Us

  The Minders

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by John Marrs

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Marrs, John (Freelance journalist), author.

  Title: The minders / John Marrs.

  Description: New York: Berkley, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020035565 (print) | LCCN 2020035566 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593334720 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593334744 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Cyberterrorism—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6113.A768 M56 2021 (print) | LCC PR6113.A768 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035565

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035566

  First published in 2020 by Del Rey, an imprint of Cornerstone. Cornerstone is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies.

  First US Edition: February 2021

  Cover images courtesy of Shutterstock

  Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

  Interior art by Shutterstock/Macrovector

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For J.R.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for John Marrs

  Novels by John Marrs

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Part Three />
  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Part Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

  —George Orwell

  PROLOGUE

  He grimaced and pinched his nostrils as he made his way up the dimly lit staircase towards a set of double doors.

  The stale-smelling offices Lee Dalgleish was about to enter were located close to the banks of London’s river Thames and a stone’s throw away from the former Battersea Power Station. The heat wave was making the odour of stagnant water and damp crawling up the walls particularly putrid.

  Two empty desks and a chair with a broken spine were the only pieces of furniture to be housed in this section of the building, alongside a bank of empty telephone sockets stretching the length of the floor and two broken television screens hanging lopsided from a wall. There was no indication to the untrained eye what else might be hidden under this roof.

  “Much of the government’s most important work isn’t carried out within the walls of Westminster or Downing Street,” he had been informed the morning of his orientation, months earlier. “It’s in places like this. It’s all about hiding in plain sight.”

  Dalgleish handed his canvas shoulder bag, mobile phone, wallet, tablet, and coat to one of three security operatives before stepping through the full-body scanner. He had passed four more guards earlier, located at the entrance. And like the ones before him now, they too were armed.

  Being scanned always gave him the jitters. It made no sense as he went through the same routine for every shift and he had done nothing that contravened the many rules governing him. He behaved in the same manner each time he approached the airport ticket desk or the Nothing to Declare lane at Heathrow—like a man burdened by guilt. He opened his mouth as an electronic saliva reader glided across his tongue before a green light flashed.

  “You’re all clear,” said the guard without a smile. She was a new face he didn’t recognise. Her delicate features, large blue eyes, and long lashes contradicted the muscular frame that rippled under her white shirt and body armour.

  “Thank you,” he muttered, and quickly looked away, realising he had held her gaze for too long. Strong women, either physically or mentally, scared and aroused him in equal measure.

  He held his hands shoulder height and pressed his fingerprints against a screen, then spoke as both biometric devices scoured his eyes and his voice patterns. Then a final set of metal doors ahead slid open.

  The recently rebranded global heating was to blame for another hot, sticky March morning which left Dalgleish feeling irritable. He had kept the windows of his second-floor flat wide open but the adjacent nightclub must have overhauled its sound system because the thump, thump, thump of electronic beats was all he could hear for much of the evening. He had eventually managed to fall asleep with balls of toilet paper stuffed into his ears but slept through the alarm on his phone. Each time he missed a gym session—which was rare—it made him recall the bullied, overweight teenager he once had been and a mild anxiety spread through him. One missed workout wasn’t going to bring back the Dalgleish of old, he reminded himself. But he still vowed to go to a spin class no matter how late he finished work to make up for his morning absence.

  He pushed his shoulders back and forth to release the building tension as he made his way to the unisex changing rooms. Under the watchful eye of another security operative, he stripped off all his clothing and placed the garments inside a metal container. Only then was he presented with his daily uniform: a fresh set, never been worn before. It was made of an undisclosed fabric with no pockets or hems to smuggle anything in or out. Underwear and socks were not permitted under this standard-issue T-shirt, trousers, and sandals.

  Once dressed, he made for his workstation inside a windowless, open-plan room. He counted forty or so people, each holding or operating tablets, wearing earpieces or VR headsets. Dozens of television screens were projected onto walls, each featuring separate locations but none of which included buildings or people—only roads, motorway bridges, the sky, and stretches of water.

  He tapped the shoulder of a man on a seat fixated by a screen in front of him. “Oh hey, Lee,” he responded, and yawned. “Is it that time already?”

  Dalgleish nodded. “Sure is. What have I missed?”

  “Same old,” replied Irvine. “Nothing. No traffic route deviation, the power levels are still running about eighty percent, and tyre pressure is constant.”

  “Where are we heading today then?”

  “We should reach the M90 and Queensferry Crossing Bridge in a little over an hour, then up to Perth and Dundee before turning around and heading back through Scotland. By the time your shift comes to an end, we’ll be somewhere in the region of Newcastle.”

  Irvine rose to his feet, removed his earpiece and smart glasses, and dropped them both into an electronics shredder under his desk. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and tipped an imaginary hat.

  Dalgleish took his seat and typed a seven-digit code into an aluminium security box he’d picked up on his entry. When the lid opened, he retrieved and slipped on a fresh pair of smart glasses and inserted a new earpiece. Then he removed a protein bar from his drawer and made himself comfortable.

  The image he would be watching for the rest of the day was the same one he had watched each day of his employment. It was the empty cab of an autonomous articulated lorry. The corner of the screen revealed that the vehicle had been travelling for seventy-six consecutive days with no stops. It recharged its batteries using wireless energy from coils under roads, and its tyres shed their skin like reptiles to reveal another set underneath. Travelling at a steady fifty-five miles per hour, the lorry calculated and chose for itself the routes it would take. Dalgleish’s job was to ensure there was no threat to its security.

  As he chewed on his bar, he checked the status reports sent to his computer from the cab’s central console to confirm Irvine’s update. Then he monitored the outside of the vehicle and its surroundings from a multitude of cameras attached to the sides, rear, and undercarriage. The only section his security clearance made it impossible to oversee was inside the trailer.

  To other road users, this articulated lorry was indistinguishable from any other on British roads. It was an unbranded, mass-manufactured driverless vehicle. The only difference was the cargo it carried. That was more important than anyone could ever imagine. Only a restricted number had a vague idea of what was hidden inside, including Dalgleish. Even fewer knew the precise details. He had signed countless nondisclosure agreements and Official Secrets Act papers forbidding him from telling anyone what his job entailed.

  He glanced in the direction of his other colleagues’ workstations. Most were doing the same as him, focusing on their own lorries. Two also kept their eyes on a solar-powered plane, and a small team was dedicated to observing the deck of a cargo ship. It was loaded with containers and travelling on an infinite loop across the North Sea, alternating its direction to avoid storm tides and changes in barometric pressure.

  With Dalgleish’s right eye returning to his own lorry, his left was getting up to speed with the day’s news as it appeared on the lens of his smart glasses. It had taken a couple of weeks for him to quietly perfect this type of multitasking, but even now his eyes ached by the end of a working day. Viewing the same image day after day was, as he once told Irvine, “as boring as hell.” And quietly, he wondered how much more he could take before he begged to be removed from this surveillance detail and put onto something more challenging.

  An hour passed and Dalgleish had moved on to his third Sudoku grid when an image onscreen caught his atte
ntion. Something had flown past the lorry. It was fleeting and likely a large bird of prey, so he almost didn’t bother to rewind the footage. But he was duty-bound to investigate everything.

  He slipped off his glasses; playing it in slow motion made the image clearer. It wasn’t a bird, it was a drone. They were a regular occurrence in British skies and he had seen them fly past his lorry before. But after viewing this one from a dozen different camera angles, he realised it seemed more persistent than the others. It was as if it was following the lorry, keeping it within its sights. His stomach tightened. Something about this scenario was making him uncomfortable.

  Dalgleish turned his head to look for his supervisor, Dominique, who sat at a desk in her office in the corner of the room. Nervously he approached and tapped on her door.

  “Dom,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but I think I might have a potential amber alert.”

  She shut the lid of her laptop. “Why, what’s happening?”

  By the time she reached his desk and they both focused on the screen, two more drones could be seen from the windscreen cameras. Rear and side cameras revealed that it was surrounded by even more.

  Dominique tapped her earpiece and spoke into it, and within moments, they were joined by her three superiors. Dalgleish had caught glimpses of the two men and a woman entering other offices in the same building but had never conversed with them. He felt self-conscious as they huddled around his desk behind him.

  “Are everyone else’s vehicles safe?” Dominique asked across the room and received a series of yeses.

  “Holy shit, what’s that?” Dalgleish asked, his surprise making him forget the company he was in.

  From the cab camera, a dark shadow was beginning to block the outside light. He switched to another device attached to the roof and rotated the lens so that it viewed above. What they saw was the underside of a helicopter, its rotating blades sweeping above it.

  “We’re under attack,” one of Dominique’s superiors said, watching closely as three figures using ropes landed on the lorry’s roof. The shadow lifted as the helicopter moved up and out of sight. “They know what we’re transporting.”