Plot
WIN courier A14 is killed in a car crash after two criminals, Miller and Sherman, pursue his vehicle and shoot out one of his tyres. The assailants recover a briefcase containing top-secret cipher codes — but are themselves killed when, the moment the case is opened without authorisation, the plastic explosive concealed inside detonates. Nevertheless, this security breach is troubling to WIN, since A14 is the third of its couriers to have been killed in less than a month. At WIN Headquarters in London, in a meeting with Sam Loover and the head of the Courier Division, Harry Sloane, Shane Weston announces his suspicion that the attacks have been engineered by a double agent and states that an upcoming mission — to deliver codes for WIN's Eastern Network to Tehran — has been cancelled.
Unknown to Sloane, his brain impulses have been recorded and transmitted to the BIG RAT at the McClaine cottage in Dorset. The Tehran mission is still due to go ahead; however, fearing that Sloane's cover may have been broken, Weston has transferred the task of delivering the codes to Joe 90, who will carry out the assignment using the other agent's knowledge and experience. Equipped with Sloane's brain impulses and a new, improved model of dispatch case, Joe is driven to the airport by Professor McClaine, surprising Mac by declaring that he will be flying to Paris. Mac's assumption that his son's orders have been modified is rebuffed by Weston and Loover, who confirm that Joe's intended destination is Tehran. From Paris, Joe flies to Copenhagen. Given the sensitivity of the information that the boy is carrying, WIN Supreme Headquarters in Washington, D.C. issues a C38 notice on Joe — all WIN agents are ordered to shoot to kill on sight.
In Copenhagen, Joe arrives at the clinic of Dr Newman, who is secretly a member of the group responsible for the courier attacks. Although Newman's telephone contact cannot believe that WIN cipher codes have been entrusted to a child, he orders Newman to rendezvous with him in the English Channel, where the case will change hands. In London, Mac insists that Joe's failure to obey orders can be attributed only to the brain impulses of Harry Sloane. Indeed, the double agent is none other than Sloane himself, whose loyalty has never been questioned — yet who is at present flying over the Channel in a helijet.
As Sloane approaches their speedboat, Newman betrays Joe and strikes out at the boy, whose spectacles are torn from his face. In the ensuing shootout, Joe's gun is blasted out of hand. Sloane airlifts Newman, bearing the case, into the helijet and pilots it away. Mac, Loover and Weston soon arrive in the Jet-Air Car and Joe, no longer influenced by Sloane's brain impulses, reports that the cipher codes have been lost. The whole time, however, Loover has been carrying a secret remote control - on activation, the stolen case's concealed plastic explosive detonates and Sloane and Newman are killed when the helijet is engulfed in a fireball in mid-air. Loover assures Mac that he would never have done the same to Joe, since the boy is without a doubt WIN's most valuable agent.
Read more about this topic: Double Agent (Joe 90)
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