Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3

by Chris Ryan

  ‘What the hell happened?’ Raf demanded as he drove.

  ‘Malcolm tried to run. A gunman on the other side of the road put him down.’

  ‘You should have been more careful.’

  Zak let that pass. He turned to Gabs. ‘Is he going to be OK?’ he asked.

  Her face and hands were smeared with Malcolm’s blood, and she was too busy trying to keep him alive. ‘He’s trying to say something,’ she said.

  Sure enough, even though Malcolm’s eyes were closed, Zak saw that his lips were moving. He strained his ears to hear what the wounded boy was trying to say. ‘One down,’ Malcolm whispered, a sinister echo of his words back in the cell. One down, two down, they don’t care . . .

  But then, an egg cupful of blood spewed from his lips. Malcolm fell silent, and Gabs continued the seemingly impossible business of trying to keep him alive.

  16 JUNE

  5

  HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

  THEY HAD GONE from one hospital to another.

  Zak had been here before. After his Mexico mission he had woken up here, and so hadn’t known exactly where it was. Tonight he had been so distracted by the emergency in the back of the CR-V that he hadn’t paid any attention to Raf’s route until they reached Westminster Bridge. At the foot of Big Ben they had turned right onto Victoria Embankment and past the Ministry of Defence, before turning sharply left into an underground car park. Zak supposed he had passed this car park any number of times without really noticing it. Curiously, it contained no cars. At the far end, two large doors were flung wide open. Raf screeched up to them. The moment he came to a halt, Zak saw that six medics had surrounded the car. From that moment on, Malcolm was their responsibility. They had a stretcher waiting for him, and a saline drip, and a defibrillator . . .

  Now they were sitting in a stark white corridor outside the operating theatre. ‘Do you think he’s going to be OK?’ Zak asked for the third time.

  With the exception of this repeated question, they had barely spoken since they arrived. Raf still appeared angry, and wouldn’t catch Zak’s eyes. Gabs, like Zak himself, was covered in Malcolm’s blood. They looked like extras from a horror movie. The blood had dried into a sticky patina on Zak’s own skin, but he didn’t think about washing it off. There were too many other thoughts coursing through his brain. Not least that it could so easily have been two down, and not just one. Who had shot Malcolm? Was the gunman anything to do with the other two intruders? And how had Malcolm known to expect them in the first place?

  ‘He’s in the best place,’ Gabs said. ‘It’s a private hospital. The security services use it when they can’t risk patients being treated somewhere public. That’s why you ended up here. They have the best surgeons. Trust me, if anyone can save him, these doctors can.’ She didn’t sound very convinced.

  The door opened and a man entered. He was a good deal older than Gabs or Raf, had shoulder-length hair, bright green eyes and brought with him the smell of cherry tobacco. His face was grim.

  ‘Michael,’ Raf said. He didn’t share Zak’s momentary surprise at their handler’s sudden appearance in the flesh.

  There was no small talk. No ‘hello’s or ‘how are you’s. Michael got straight to the point. ‘What happened?’ he demanded.

  Zak gave a precise account of his actions. He left nothing out. He’d been debriefed by Michael before, and he knew that the old man would spot any holes or inconsistencies in the story. Once he’d finished, Michael gave a curt nod and silence fell on the corridor once more.

  ‘I don’t understand how he knew someone was coming for him,’ Zak said after a minute.

  Michael sniffed. ‘He broke into the Americans’ systems once. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t do it again and find out whatever he wants. We gave him the internet-connected laptop in the hope that we could work out how he’s doing it. He managed to bypass all our spyware and key-logging programs, of course. If I had to guess, I’d say the shooter was American. They’d probably prefer to talk to him, but in the absence of an agreement with us to send him over there, a dead Malcolm Mann solves a lot of their problems.’

  ‘Do you think he found out about the Pimlico bomb using his hacking skills?’ Raf asked. He sounded a little less surly now. Perhaps Zak’s debrief had persuaded him that this whole mess wasn’t somehow his protégé’s fault.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Michael said. ‘Our only hope now is to pray that he recovers enough to tell us what else he knows. Otherwise we’re groping in the—’

  ‘Wait,’ Zak said.

  The other three looked at him. He clenched his eyes shut, struggling as an idea formed in his head. He was remembering something Gabs had said to him only this morning.

  Governments and intelligence agencies spend millions every year on encryption and decryption software more advanced than a human mind could ever hope to achieve. Telephone calls across the Atlantic are constantly monitored for trigger words. Same goes for emails . . .

  He opened his eyes again. ‘Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight, right?’

  The others nodded.

  ‘If you wanted to get a message to someone – say, where and when a bomb was going to go off – and you were worried about it being intercepted, you could try complicated encryption, or you could just put it somewhere nobody would ever think of looking.’

  ‘Such as?’ Michael asked. He had an intent look on his face.

  Zak shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘A newspaper crossword, maybe?’

  Three sets of eyes stared at him.

  ‘Go on, Zak,’ Michael murmured.

  ‘Malcolm had them pinned to his wall. He said that thing about other people ignoring them. I think . . . I think we should look at those crosswords. Say, for the last week. See if there’s anything there. Any message.’

  For a moment, Michael didn’t reply. He glanced towards the door to the operating theatre. Zak felt Raf and Gabs’s eyes on him. They were sceptical. But neither did they seem to have any better ideas.

  Finally, Michael spoke. ‘Do it,’ he said. ‘Malcolm will be safe here.’

  With that, he walked down the corridor and disappeared.

  You have a problem.

  The words appeared in real time on the screen of a laptop. The man sitting at the laptop thought carefully for a few seconds before tapping out his reply.

  I don’t think so. Everything happened as I planned. You decoded my message?

  He waited.

  There is a hacker. His name is Malcolm Mann. My sources inside British Intelligence tell me he tipped them off about your first bomb. Luckily for you, he was ignored.

  A link appeared on the screen. The man clicked it. It led him to a Press Association newswire. Shots reported outside Harrington Secure Hospital, South London.

  Harrington Secure Hospital is Malcolm Mann’s last known place of residence.

  The man sucked on his teeth as he wondered how to reply: Coincidence?

  Don’t insult my intelligence. It’s up to you, but if I was in your position I would want to be sure that nobody had solved your little puzzle.

  The man felt his eyes narrowing. Perhaps his electronic pen pal had a point.

  If the code had been cracked, there was only one place it would lead anybody. So he decided to watch that address. From the peg behind the door he removed a raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat. Then he left his simple apartment, making very sure to lock the door carefully behind him.

  Back at the flat in Knightsbridge, Zak supposed he should sleep. It was five a.m. after all – almost dawn – and it had been, by anybody’s standards, a long day.

  But there was no chance of that. Not with a puzzle like this in front of him.

  Once he and Gabs had showered off Malcolm’s blood and changed into fresh clothes that were waiting for them, it had been a moment’s work to download and print out the Daily Post’s crosswords for the past ten days. Raf and Gabs had humoured him for an hour by staring at them with blank faces
. ‘Sweetie,’ Gabs had said just before they went to bed, ‘I’m not sure this is time well spent.’

  But Zak didn’t agree. He had yesterday’s crossword solution in front of him. He jabbed a finger at one of the solutions. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘One down.’ The word was BOMBING.

  ‘That means nothing, Zak,’ Gabs had said with one hand laid gently on his shoulder. ‘It’s just a word. Two down is OATMEAL. Are you telling me the next attack’s going to be in a porridge factory?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Gabs continued, ‘the bomb went off first thing in the morning, before anybody could even do the crossword.’

  ‘No,’ Zak objected. ‘Don’t you remember? Malcolm called his psychiatrist at 0100 hours. The early editions of these papers come out the night before. He could have seen the crossword online . . .’

  Gabs had given him a slightly sympathetic look. ‘You’re tired, sweetie. We all are. Let’s get some sleep, hey?’

  Zak had rubbed his eyes. ‘Sure,’ he had said with a sigh. ‘In a minute.’ But a minute had turned into an hour, and an hour had turned into two. For all that time, Zak had stared at the crossword, somehow convinced he was on the edge of something, but not sure what.

  Six o’clock came. Having stared at it for so long, he could see the crossword grid in his mind:

  Was there a sentence to be made up of these words? If there was, he couldn’t see it. His mind focused on the word UKRAINIAN. Michael had talked about the Americans, the Chinese and the Iranians. Was there some other involvement? Was the word ASYLUM significant? It was, after all, an old-fashioned word for a secure hospital. He Googled some words he didn’t know: ABKHAS, people who lived around the Black Sea; GALEI, a kind of shark. But no matter how long he stared at this puzzle, or at any of the others, no patterns or clues emerged. Gabs was right. He was following the wrong lead.

  He stood up and walked across the room. There were large floor-to-ceiling windows here, looking out over London. The sun was rising and he could make out all the familiar landmarks: the BT tower, the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace. From this high-up vantage point, he could see what looked like insects flying in the distance: military choppers, keeping watch over the capital. Zak wondered what they hoped to see. They were probably, he thought, just there to give the impression of security, when the truth was that London was very far from being secure.

  When the truth was that London was under attack.

  He thought back to the history lessons Raf and Gabs had been giving him. When people imagined London under attack, they thought of the Blitz at the beginning of the Second World War. But times had changed. Enemies had changed. Now, they were more likely to plant a bomb underground than drop it from the skies. Malcolm had been right. It seemed more cowardly, somehow. And much, much harder to prevent.

  His eye was drawn north to Camden, where he used to live and where his cousin, Ellie, still did – no thanks to Cruz Martinez, who had done everything in his power to kill her. She was only alive now thanks to Raf and Gabs. But she was alive, while Cruz was dead and his loathsome henchman Calaca was mouldering in prison.

  His eyes picked out the area around Pimlico Station. From this distance there was no trace of the bombing . . .

  He stopped.

  Pimlico. Bombing.

  Something twigged.

  Zak hurried back to where he had been sitting. He double-checked something he was already sure of: the position of the word BOMBING in the crossword.

  One down.

  What if Malcolm hadn’t been referring to his own imminent demise, when he had whispered these words?

  What if he had been giving them a message?

  He grabbed a pencil and, on a sheet of scrap paper, wrote the two words, one on top of each other.

  He cast his mind back to the lesson Gabs had given him just the previous day. The one-time pad. What if there was some kind of code, hidden here in plain sight? He scribbled down the alphabet, A–Z, with the numbers 0–25 underneath each letter in turn.

  It took him less than a minute to work out the key necessary to turn the word BOMBING into the word PIMLICO.

  Zak stared at the cipher. Once again, Gabs’s words rang in his mind. The person writing the code and the person deciphering it need this key . . .

  He shook his head. He was still clutching at straws, trying to see something that wasn’t there. Raf and Gabs were right. He should get some sleep. It felt like random strings of letters were dancing in front of his eyes.

  Zak was about to push the crossword to one side when it jumped out at him. He blinked heavily and his mouth went dry with a sudden surge of excitement. He peered more closely at the grid and then, in a flurry of activity, scribbled out all the ‘down’ solutions after the first one.

  And with a slightly trembling hand, he drew a circle around the first letters of these words.

  The key. Hidden in plain sight. Both the code and the key in the same place. You only had to know how to look. Malcolm had seen it immediately – it was just the way his brain worked. And now so had Zak.

  ‘Gabs!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Raf! Wake up! Now!’

  They stared groggily at him. They hadn’t taken too kindly to being woken, and they were clearly a bit confused.

  ‘The crossword. It’s a message and a cipher key all in one. Look.’

  He showed them what he’d discovered.

  ‘Michael told us that Malcolm sees patterns where nobody else can. It was obvious to him.’

  His two Guardian Angels were looking at him with an awed expression. ‘Very good, sweetie,’ Gabs breathed. ‘Our little cub is growing up.’ She turned to Raf. ‘I think we need to tell Michael, don’t you?’

  Raf nodded. He pulled out his phone and touched the screen, before stepping into the next room to make the call.

  ‘Did you find anything else in the crossword?’ Gabs asked. ‘A time? A date?’

  ‘The date the crossword appears could be the date of the bomb,’ Raf called from the other room. ‘Too much of a coincidence otherwise. But could there be something about a time in there, Zak?’

  Zak shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything else. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look for it. There’s something I don’t understand, though. Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘If you’re going to plant a bomb, why advertise it in such a weird way? I mean, either you want people to know about it, or you don’t, right?’

  Gabs nodded her agreement. The problem had clearly crossed her mind too. ‘If you’re going to do something like this, you’re clearly not right in the head. Maybe the bomber’s on some kind of crazy power trip. Maybe he gets a thrill out of knowing he’s put the information out there in plain sight.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Zak replied. ‘Maybe.’ He wasn’t convinced.

  Raf returned. ‘We’re going straight to the horse’s mouth.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Zak asked.

  ‘Somebody set this crossword,’ Raf said. ‘I think we ought to have a little word with them, don’t you? Michael’s sending me the details.’ As Raf spoke, his phone buzzed. He checked the screen and nodded with satisfaction. ‘A Mr Alan Hinton,’ he announced. ‘Thirty-one St Mary’s Crescent, Ealing. Let’s go. With a bit of luck we’ll get to him before he’s even had his Weetabix.’

  Raf gave a grim smile, and led them out of the apartment.

  6

  THE PUZZLE MASTER

  0638hrs

  ST MARY’S CRESCENT was a pleasant, leafy street in a well-to-do residential area of west London. On the way, Gabs had read out information on their target that Michael had transmitted to her phone. ‘Alan Michael Hinton, age fifty-three. Unmarried. No children. Writes crosswords, Sudokus, chess puzzles, that kind of thing – mostly for the Daily Post newspaper on a freelance basis. Uses the pseudonym “Puzzle Master”. No criminal record. Not even a blip on the radar of the security service
s. Just about the last person on earth you’d expect to be involved in terrorist hit.’

  ‘Either that,’ Raf had said, ‘or he’s just got good cover.’

  As they climbed out of the CR-V – Zak had sat awkwardly in the back seat to avoid getting stained again by Malcolm’s blood – he counted three men in suits leaving their houses to go to work. They all carried colourful umbrellas against the pouring rain. A milk van trundled up the road, its glass bottles rattling. A bedraggled urban fox scuttled under a car. It was a very ordinary – if drenched – suburban street.

  And number thirty-one was a very ordinary suburban house. A neat front garden with beige gravel and pot plants; a smartly painted red front door; a low brick boundary wall and an iron gate; all the curtains closed. The gate squeaked as Raf opened it and Zak followed him up the garden path to the door, while Gabs hurried off down the street, trying to gain access round the back.

  It took Raf approximately thirty seconds to pick the lock on the front door using a set of standard lock picks and tension tools. Time enough for the rain to soak them through. Zak could tell instantly that something was wrong. As the door opened, he heard the scraping of mail against the floor on the other side. Either the Puzzle Master was extremely popular, or he hadn’t been picking up his post. They closed the door behind them and took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dim light.

  The hallway led all the way along to a kitchen at the back of the house. A door to their left, a staircase straight ahead. And a strange smell. Very faint, but unpleasantly sweet. Zak had an uncomfortable feeling, and from the look on his face, so did Raf. Neither of them spoke. They just stepped forward to start searching the house.