Under Cover (Agent 21)

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Bring her here,’ he said quietly.

  Nobody moved. Hunter’s watery eyes grew narrow again.

  Silence.

  ‘Suspicious, ain’t ya, fella?’ Hunter said.

  ‘I wonder why,’ Ricky replied. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to get out of there.

  Hunter looked over at Tommy. Then he nodded. Tommy continued his walk across the basement. When he reached the door, he hesitated for a moment, then opened it and entered the adjoining room.

  Thirty seconds passed.

  A minute.

  Hunter didn’t take his eyes off Ricky. Nor did any of the other Thrownaways. He felt the scar on his wrist start to tingle.

  – We should get out of here. Something’s wrong.

  – Wait! I can hear movement . . .

  It came from the direction of the adjoining room. The door opened again and Tommy stepped out into the main basement room. Behind him, framed in the doorway, was the figure of a girl.

  Ricky peered through the gloom to make out her features. He saw long hair, straggly, matted, dirty. Bloodshot eyes with huge black rings underneath them. Cracked lips. A frightened, pale face.

  She didn’t smile and she didn’t move. But she didn’t have to. Ricky recognized her features. They were almost identical to those of his dead sister.

  But this wasn’t Madeleine.

  Ricky had found Izzy Cole.

  13

  TRIDENT

  Hunter sidled up to Ricky. ‘She ain’t leaving Keeper’s House.’

  ‘What if she wants to?’

  Hunter gave him one of his nasty leers. ‘Izzy, love,’ he called across the basement to the girl. ‘This fella wants a chat. Feel like going for a little walk with him?’

  Izzy Cole shook her head. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she whispered. Her voice was cracked and weak, and her eyes darted around the room.

  ‘Like I say’ – Hunter smirked – ‘she ain’t leaving.’

  Ricky stepped forward. His footsteps were the only noise in that basement. ‘I just wanted to talk to you, Izzy. Is that all right?’

  She looked uncertain. But after a few seconds, she nodded and disappeared back into the side room.

  ‘You’ve got ten minutes,’ Hunter muttered. ‘Then I’m kicking you out.’

  The side room was smaller than the main basement room. About ten metres by ten. The only light came from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The floor was covered with thin, dirty mattresses. Clearly this was where the Hunter’s Thrownaways slept. Izzy was in the far corner, huddled on the ground, clutching her knees. She stared, not at Ricky but into the middle distance, with big, lonely, frightened eyes.

  ‘My name’s Ricky.’ He tried to sound friendly and upbeat. It was difficult in a place like this.

  No reply.

  ‘I’m here to help you.’

  ‘I don’t need any help,’ Izzy said.

  ‘I’m sorry, but . . . Ricky looked around meaningfully. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Izzy whispered.

  Ricky walked over and crouched down next to her. ‘Your mum and dad want you back home,’ he said.

  Izzy gave a mirthless laugh. ‘That’s what they said, is it? Well, I’m not going. What’s it got to do with you, anyway?’

  Ricky didn’t reply.

  Izzy moved her head slightly to look at him. ‘I think I’ve seen you before,’ she said slowly.

  Ricky nodded. ‘Christmas Eve maybe? If you were around King’s Cross then? In a woolly hat, right? I saw a picture of you there too. Your face was badly bruised. It looks a bit better now.’

  Izzy touched her cheek. ‘That’s why I’m not going back,’ she whispered. ‘Who are you anyway? Did my dad send you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  A difficult question to answer. Ricky decided not to. ‘Why don’t you want to go home?’ he asked.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  Ricky stood up. He started pacing. ‘I ran away from home too,’ he said. ‘Eighteen months ago. Never been back.’

  He could instantly tell that he had Izzy’s attention. ‘Why?’

  ‘I was living with foster parents. My mum and dad had died. My foster parents kept dragging me to this obscure church and saying he wanted to save my soul. Not a normal everyday church either, but some weird sect . . .’

  ‘At least they didn’t beat you up,’ Izzy said. ‘My dad just . . .’ She touched her cheek again. ‘Please don’t tell him where I am.’

  Ricky looked towards the door. ‘Why are you staying with Hunter, though?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got nowhere else. And I met Tommy and some of the others on the street and they said this was safer than being on my own . . .’

  ‘I bet they did,’ Ricky muttered. ‘You know what he does? Hunter, I mean. You know that he gets these kids to steal for him?’

  Izzy nodded. ‘But,’ she said quietly, ‘he said I could just stay, and not do any of that.’

  Ricky raised his eyebrow at her, but Izzy already seemed to know how naive she sounded.

  ‘Are you going to tell my dad where I am?’ she asked.

  Ricky hesitated. He pulled his phone from his pocket. Speed dial one. And you call immediately. He took hold of Izzy’s hand and wrote his number on the back of it. ‘Hunter’s bad news,’ he said. ‘Any time you need some help, just call.’

  He walked towards the door.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Izzy called after him. ‘Are you going to tell my dad?’

  Ricky paused and looked over his shoulder. ‘Of course I’m not,’ he said.

  Eight p.m.

  The first thing Ricky did when he was back at his apartment was wash. Hot, steaming water that drove away the cold that had seeped into his bones, and cleaned off the grime and stench of Keeper’s House. Only when he was out of the shower, dried and dressed, did he call Felix.

  ‘I found her.’

  There was a pause on the line.

  ‘That was very quick, Coco.’ Felix sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you.’

  He hung up.

  Ricky reckoned it would be less than half an hour before Felix turned up at his door. He was right. Twenty-three minutes later the buzzer sounded. Ricky opened up and stepped aside as Felix limped into the apartment and through to the main room.

  ‘What do you mean, you’re not going to tell me?’ Felix’s face was unusually fierce.

  ‘Which bit didn’t you understand?’ Ricky said.

  Felix narrowed his eyes and peered at him. ‘This isn’t a game, Coco. It’s serious.’

  ‘And so am I. She ran away from home for a reason. Her dad was beating her up. I’m not going to let you send her back.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Coco.’

  ‘No!’ Ricky blazed. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got no idea what it’s like, being beaten up by someone older than you, day after day . . . It’s what happened to my sister—’

  Suddenly Ricky cut himself short. Felix had hitched up his trouser leg, just a few centimetres, to reveal the bottom of his prosthetic leg. Ricky stared at the narrow metal poles joining Felix’s ankle to his knee, and suddenly felt rather ashamed of what he’d just said.

  Felix let the trouser leg fall again. ‘Sit down, Coco,’ he said. ‘Sit down, shut up, and listen.’

  Ricky perched on the edge of the sofa. Felix sat opposite him.

  ‘It’s time you started to realize that the world really is more complicated than you thought. Please, Coco, just be quiet and don’t answer back for once. Now, do you really think you can live in this kind of luxury, and receive the kind of education I’ve been giving you, and not have to give anything back?’

  Ricky didn’t reply.

  ‘I’ve already told you this once. I work for a top-secret government agency
. And as long as you live in this flat and receive weekly money and training, so do you. Don’t talk, Coco. Just listen!’

  Felix breathed deeply. He was clearly angry and trying to calm himself down. Ricky felt a strange chill – he suspected he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear.

  ‘Part of our work is to recruit youngsters like you. Not just anyone, mind. They need to be bright and promising. They need to have skills a little out of the ordinary. And they need to be youngsters whose absence nobody would notice, or at least mind. It’s a very precise profile, Coco, and you fit it. I’m good at spotting these youngsters, drawing them to me for the initial contact – remember what a mark I looked when you first saw me? – and you’ve already shown me time and again since then that you have a very high degree of aptitude for the work involved. Your attitude is a different matter, of course, but we can work on that.

  ‘Now you’re probably wondering why this agency needs to recruit young people. Well, certain situations sometimes arise where the presence of adult agents would be noticed. In these instances, we need to rely on kids. If you stop and think about it for a moment, none of this should come as too much of a surprise to you. And if you give it a moment’s more thought, you should work out that we don’t use this precious resource simply to hunt down runaway kids like Izzy Cole. Not unless there’s a very good reason to do so.’

  ‘So why are you so interested in her?’ Ricky asked. He spoke very quietly as he realized that there was more important stuff going on here than he could ever have imagined.

  ‘I’m not interested in her,’ Felix said. He sounded rather harsh. ‘Not in the least. But I’m extremely interested in her father.’

  ‘Because he beat her up?’

  Felix gave Ricky a thin smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not because of that.’ He stood up and started to pace. His limp seemed more pronounced than usual, and Ricky wondered if it hurt. Now wasn’t the time to ask. Felix started to speak again. ‘Does the word “Trident” mean anything to you?’

  ‘I’ve heard it.’

  ‘Do you know what Trident is?’

  ‘Not really.’ He wanted to add: ‘I’m only fourteen, remember?’ But he figured it wouldn’t go down too well.

  ‘Then listen hard, Coco. Trident is the United Kingdom’s nuclear capability. It consists of four nuclear submarines each armed with D-5 ballistic missiles.’

  At the word ‘nuclear’, Ricky felt faintly sick. ‘What’s a D-5 ballistic missile?’ he asked.

  Felix gave him a fierce stare. ‘A big one,’ he said. ‘Each submarine contains forty thermonuclear warheads. At least one submarine is constantly in service around British waters. It’s ready to launch a missile within a range of four thousand nautical miles, if the UK is provoked.’

  Ricky felt a chill. ‘Would that ever happen?’ he asked.

  ‘Nobody wants it to. It’s called a nuclear deterrent. The idea is that as long as we have nuclear weapons, nobody will attack us, and as long as our enemies have them, we won’t attack either. It works, because only a madman would want to start an all-out nuclear war.’ Felix gave Ricky a piercing stare. ‘Look out the window, Coco,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  Ricky walked up to the window and looked out over London. It was dark now, and the air was still thick with snow. It swirled in great torrents, and deadened the glow of the city lights. ‘Snow,’ he said. ‘All I can see is snow.’

  ‘Have you ever heard the phrase “nuclear winter”?’

  Ricky shook his head. He didn’t quite trust himself to speak.

  ‘It’s what scientists think will happen in the event of a major nuclear incident. The air gets filled with radioactive dust, the sun’s rays get blocked out and the temperature on the ground lowers dramatically. We experience major climate change. You think the snow’s bad tonight, Coco? Imagine what it’s like during a nuclear winter – if you’re lucky enough to survive the blast, that is, and you don’t have radiation sickness eating into your body.’

  ‘I get the point,’ Ricky said quietly.

  ‘Oh, good,’ Felix said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘I am glad about that. So sit down again, and I’ll tell you what all this has to do with Izzy Cole.’

  Ricky returned to the sofa. He definitely felt sick now.

  ‘The precise location of any given nuclear submarine is highly sensitive and secret information. If that information were to get into the wrong hands, there could be terrible repercussions.’

  Ricky frowned. ‘But you said yourself that only a madman would want to cause a nuclear war.’

  ‘You’re right. Unfortunately, such men exist. There are terrorists, or members of rogue states, who would pay a great deal of money for nuclear submarine location codes. And they would only pay such sums if they were prepared to use the information.’

  Felix allowed that thought to sink in before continuing.

  ‘We believe that Jacob Cole MP, Izzy’s dad, has got his hands on these codes and is preparing to sell them to the highest bidder. Our sources suggest that they are probably Russian, but we don’t know anything else about them.’

  Ricky blinked.

  ‘You look surprised, Coco. Don’t be. You’re pretty relaxed about stealing other people’s belongings, but I like to think you have some sort of moral code. However, you’ll soon learn that some people will do anything for money.’

  ‘Can’t they just change the codes?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘Of course. And as soon as they do, Cole will know.’

  ‘Then why not, just, I don’t know . . . sack him or something.’

  ‘And let Cole’s paymasters move on to somebody else who we have no intelligence on? Thanks, but no thanks. In any case, Cole is extremely close to the Prime Minister. The PM will never believe that he’s guilty of such a crime.’ He shook his head. ‘Some issues are far too important to take to mere politicians. We have to deal with them discreetly ourselves. And that’s why I need to get my hands on Izzy Cole. We’ve known for some time that her father has been violent to her. We know how much she hates him. That’s why she’s useful to us. We have a bucketload of rumour and hearsay about Jacob Cole, but we have no hard evidence, and that’s what we have to get our hands on if we’re going to bring him to justice. We need his daughter to spy on him. To gather information that will help us prove what he’s up to. And to get our hands on the men he’s in contact with.’ He drew a deep, calming breath. ‘It was extremely inconvenient for us when Izzy decided to run away from home. And that’s why I need you to bring her to me. It’s urgent, Ricky. More urgent than you can possibly know.’

  Felix sat back and opened his arms in a gesture that said: Over to you.

  Ricky paced. He felt Felix’s eyes on him. He was confused. In the course of the past few minutes, life had turned serious. Half of him wondered if this was all some bad-taste joke. But then he looked around him again, at the plush, hi-tech surroundings in which he found himself. It was true. Nobody would pluck him from poverty and give him this sort of lifestyle without expecting something in return.

  He trusted Felix. He believed him. His head swam with thoughts of submarines and nuclear winters. He didn’t doubt that Felix was telling him the truth. He walked over to the window again, and stared out at the unwelcoming, threatening snow.

  Then he turned.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Silence.

  ‘Would you like to explain why?’ Felix asked, his voice quiet and steady.

  ‘You said you’d like to think I’ve got some sort of moral code. Well, here it is. My older sister killed herself because her foster parents were violent towards her. Killed herself, Felix. She wasn’t much older than Izzy Cole.’

  Ricky was determined not to let the tears come. He stared fiercely at Felix.

  ‘It’s not OK to send Izzy Cole back into a house where she’s going to be beaten up. I saw the picture of her. It was bad.’

  ‘But the codes, Coco.’

  ‘That’s a grow
n-ups’ problem. You need to find a grown-ups’ solution, not just enlist a bunch of kids to do your dirty work. Or maybe you can ask big bad Agent 21, if you can persuade him that it’s OK for an adult to slap a kid around.’ He looked at the room again. Sure, it was swish. Warm. Comfortable. But he’d lived without it before, and he could live without it again. ‘I’m done with all this,’ he said, and he walked out of the room.

  He stormed into his bedroom, stuck his hand under his mattress and grabbed the sock where he had been carefully stashing his weekly money. It was empty. Ricky hurled it across the room. He didn’t know how or when it had been emptied, but it just made him more angry. More determined to leave. He still had a bit of money in his trouser pocket – a few notes and a handful of change. That would have to be enough.

  On his bedside table he noticed the snap gun Felix had given him on his first day, and which he’d gradually mastered over his time here. Could be useful, for a thief. He chucked it in a rucksack, then pulled on a thick jumper and coat. He grabbed a Nike baseball cap and put it on, the peak pointing backwards.

  – Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

  – Yep. It’s over. I don’t want to be part of this any more.

  He returned to where Felix was still sitting in the main room.

  ‘You can’t bring your sister back by saving Izzy Cole, you know,’ Felix said quietly.

  Ricky felt like spitting. ‘Nice knowing you,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother sending anyone to follow me this time. You know I’ll only lose them.’

  Felix didn’t reply, so Ricky turned his back on him and left the flat, slamming the door behind him.

  PART THREE

  14

  IZZY’S ESCAPE

  Boxing Day, 11:30 p.m.

  More than ever before, Ricky felt the need to be aware of people following him as he stormed out of the apartment block. He wasn’t even subtle about checking for tails this time – he didn’t have the patience any more. He just stopped every ten paces and looked around. Rather to his surprise, he didn’t see anyone suspicious. A tall young woman with white-blonde hair cast him a sidelong glance as she walked past him, but moments later she had disappeared round a corner and Ricky noticed nobody else who looked even remotely out of the ordinary.