Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3

by Chris Ryan

  ‘On the move, m’boy. Leaving this sceptred isle, escaping to pastures new. Or at least, we think it is. I’ve asked readers of my column to count the number of sparrows they’ve seen over the past week.’ A troubled look crossed his face. He rummaged around his desk a little more, lifted up a pile of paper and with a triumphant ‘Ha!’ pulled another sheaf of papers, at least as large as the first, from underneath and handed it to Zak. ‘Fabulous response,’ Hendricks said. ‘Bit of bore for an old brain like mine to deal with. Wonder if you might log ’em all.’ He patted his elderly computer screen, then turned it round so that it was facing Zak. ‘Not my thing, really, Harry m’boy, but it’s got to be easier for you than for me. And besides, I have an article to pen on the fascinating subject of the long-tailed shrike.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The long-tailed shrike, my dear boy. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it.’

  ‘Er, ’fraid not.’

  ‘Ah, well it is rather rare. A vagrant in fact, only landing in the British Isles by accident. But quite lovely. Quite, quite lovely . . .’

  Hendricks continued to state just how lovely while Zak looked rather gloomily down at the pieces of paper in his hand. There had to be at least 500. He glanced towards Ludgrove’s desk – he was no longer there. If Zak refused Hendricks’s request, or even moaned about it, he could be out of here a minute later. That would have been fine by him, but Michael might have a thing or two to say about it. He sighed, and took a seat at the desk. If he made a start on this boring job now, he could have a snoop around the offices while Hendricks wasn’t there.

  ‘Look lively, m’boy,’ Hendricks said in a low voice. ‘Editor’s on his way.’

  The editor was a short man with a pot belly and hair that sprouted from the top of his open-necked shirt. He had a rather harassed look on his face, and clearly didn’t even notice Zak’s presence. ‘Hendricks!’ he barked. ‘I want a piece for tomorrow’s paper on the environmental effect of this blasted explosion on the wildlife of the city. Got it?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Hendricks said, his voice quietly shocked.

  ‘I said, I want a—’

  ‘That will be quite impossible.’

  The editor blinked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘It will by quite impossible. I’m preparing an article on the long-tailed shrike.’

  The editor looked at him as if he was mad. All of a sudden, Hendricks started to read from the pad on his desk, holding one arm in front of him like an actor. ‘Quiet, graceful, powerful!’ he announced. ‘Every person near Yarmouth will witness jaw-dropping, Xanadu-like tails, unbelievably splendid swooping and diving as flocks of this rare bird, seldom seen in the British Isles, flock to the south coast . . .’

  The editor’s face went a little red. ‘Hendricks, you can stuff your long-tailed whatever-it-is. I don’t want a single piece in tomorrow’s paper that isn’t about bombs. Do I make myself clear?’

  Hendricks looked shocked. ‘But—’

  The editor didn’t let him finish. He grabbed the piece of paper Hendricks had been writing on, crumpled it up and threw it to the floor like a child having a tantrum. ‘Do I make myself clear?’

  Their gazes locked. ‘Quite clear,’ Hendricks murmured, suddenly contrite. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The editor stomped away and started shouting at somebody else on the other side of the newsroom while Hendricks picked up the crumpled piece of paper from the floor.

  For a few minutes, Hendricks mumbled into his beard, but he soon recovered his good temper. To Zak’s chagrin, he showed no signs of leaving his desk. He sat there for the next hour, wittering away almost nonstop as he browsed through the paper on his desk and buried his nose into the various wildlife books that were scattered around. ‘The grebe, Harry, marvellous bird, wonder if our readers might like a little piece on the grebe one of these days . . . Ah, the starling! Underrated. I could write a book on the starling, Harry m’boy, but twitchers are a funny lot. They have their favourites like everyone, I suppose . . .’

  Soon Hendricks’s voice just became part of the background. An hour passed, as Zak entered the mind-numbingly boring data on the sheets in front of him: names, addresses, number of sparrows spotted.

  Ten a.m. Check-in. Twelve a.m. Check-in again. By now, Zak had developed the skill of nodding at the right moment to make it appear that he was listening. In fact, as he typed, the cogs in his mind were turning . . . NY HER . . . Ludgrove could have been reading anything, of course, but he’d seemed extremely keen to switch off his screen when he’d seen Zak watching. What had it said? NY – did that stand for New York? HER – if the next letter was an O, it spelled HERO. New York Hero. What could that mean?

  He was never going to find anything out stuck here at a desk in a corner of the office. He needed an excuse to get away from Hendricks. Making a cup of tea or nipping to the loo wasn’t good enough. He wanted to find out what had been on Ludgrove’s screen.

  The answer, he realized, was staring him in the face.

  He was inputting his data into an Excel spreadsheet. Hendricks couldn’t see the screen. Even if he could, Zak reckoned he would be so absorbed talking about the native ladybird that he wouldn’t notice what Zak was about to do. He minimized the screen, navigated to the system files of the hard drive, copied one of them to another location and then deleted the original. When he tried to relaunch Excel, an error message appeared on the screen.

  ‘And you see, Harry, m’boy, the trouble with these invasive species is that they have a terrible effect on the—’

  ‘Um, Mr Hendricks?’

  ‘Call me Rodney, m’boy.’

  ‘There’s something wrong with my computer.’

  A slightly panicked look crossed Hendricks’s face. He stood up, walked round to Zak’s side of the table and scratched his beard as he looked at the error message, clearly baffled. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to call the IT boys in.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Zak said quickly. ‘I’ll go and find them. I could do with stretching my legs.’

  Hendricks looked momentarily uncertain, but then he smiled. ‘Of course, m’boy. But hurry back, eh? Important work. You’ll find them down in the basement. Gloomy old place. Don’t care for it myself . . .’ He shuffled back round to his side of the desk where he picked up his book again. Zak crossed the office floor. When he was halfway to the lift he looked back. Hendricks was totally immersed, but a quick look in the other direction told him that Ludgrove was watching him leave.

  There was something about his gaze that made the skin on the back of Zak’s neck tingle. He suppressed the desire to return the defence correspondent’s stare. He’d already done enough to arouse suspicion and he knew he had to be more careful. He also knew he had to examine the contents of Ludgrove’s computer. It was like an itch that needed scratching. Trying to sit at the screen was too clumsy and obvious. There were a hundred others in this room who would notice him sitting where he shouldn’t be. Which meant finding a back way. Hacking into the newspaper’s intranet. Once he had done that, he could have all the access he wanted.

  Zak Darke stood in front of the closed lift doors and pressed the button marked ‘B’.

  13

  LIQUID LUNCH

  FOUR PEOPLE STOOD silently in the lift as he descended – three men, one woman. None of them spoke, to Zak or to each other, and they all stepped out on the ground floor, leaving Zak to get to the basement alone.

  The doors slid open onto a deserted corridor. To his right, a mop leaning against the bare wall and, ten metres beyond that, a green door marked FIRE EXIT. Someone had taped a piece of paper onto the wall opposite him. The letters ‘IT’ were scrawled on it, and an arrow to the left. Zak followed the corridor along and to the right. He reached an open door that led into a large, windowless room. There was one man in here in his early twenties. He appeared to be playing Call of Duty on one of the eight large terminals dotted around the room. A heavy, metallic drilling s
ound of gunfire came from his machine, and because it was gloomy down here in the basement, his face glowed with the light of the screen.

  Zak coughed to announce his presence. The guy looked up from his game.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Zak stepped into the room. ‘I’ve got a problem with my computer,’ he said.

  ‘Tried turning it off and on again?’ the guy said in a bored voice, all his attention back on his computer game.

  ‘Yes,’ Zak replied. ‘I tried that. No luck.’

  The Call of Duty boy sighed – he obviously considered Zak to be an unwelcome interruption to his gaming session – pressed a button on his screen to pause the game and stood up. With obvious reluctance, he stomped over to another terminal.

  Zak stepped further into the room. ‘I didn’t get your name,’ he said.

  ‘Darren.’ The IT guy was sitting at a second terminal directly opposite the one on which he was playing his game. ‘What computer you using?’ he asked.

  ‘Rodney Hendricks’s.’

  Darren’s eyes rolled as if to say, not him again. ‘Quite sure he switched it on in the first place, are you?’

  Zak forced a smile at the IT man’s little joke, then indicated the chair he’d just vacated. ‘Mind if I sit down.’

  ‘S’long as you don’t touch anything. Getting a high score on that thing. Got a high score last week and all . . .’

  Zak sat down in front of the Call of Duty screen. It showed an assault rifle aimed in the direction of three Taliban fighters, their heads wrapped in keffiyahs, and a snow-topped mountain range in the background. As Darren’s fingers flew over the keyboard of his new terminal, however, Zak nonchalantly pressed the ESC key and the game screen shrank to a normal-sized window, which he quickly minimized.

  ‘I’ve got remote access,’ Darren announced. ‘What’s wrong then?’

  ‘Excel,’ Zak said. ‘Not loading.’ He clicked the remote access icon on his own screen. A window popped up with a list of names. He scanned down until he found ‘Ludgrove, J’. He double-clicked on the name. A password-entry box appeared.

  ‘Hey!’

  Zak started. He looked up at Darren.

  ‘You been messing with the system files?’

  Zak glanced guiltily at the Call of Duty computer, before realizing Darren was talking about the one upstairs. ‘I haven’t touched them,’ he said.

  ‘Well someone has,’ Darren grunted. ‘In the last ten minutes too. Moved a .exe file from the system folder. Anyone else been at your machine?’

  ‘No. Actually . . . yes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Another work-experience guy. Black hair. Wears a green tie. Don’t know his name.’ As Zak spun his lie, Darren stood up and started walking back to his original terminal. Zak felt his pulse racing as he clicked cancel then maximized the Call of Duty screen again. ‘I’ll have a word with him, shall I? Tell him to . . .’ Darren was right next to him now, looking meaningfully at the seat Zak had taken. ‘Sorry . . .’ Zak jumped up. ‘Anyway, thanks.’

  Darren grunted again. The sounds of his game filled the room almost before he was sitting down.

  Zak was halfway to the door when he suddenly turned, as though something had just struck him. ‘You know what?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That work-experience dude. I think I saw him on someone else’s computer. Better make sure he didn’t mess that one up too.’

  Darren dragged his eyes away from the screen to give Zak a sour look. He paused his game for a second time, then started walking back over to the other computer.

  Zak moved quickly but stealthily. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he swiped the screen and tapped the camera icon, all the while moving in the direction of the second terminal. As Darren sat down, Zak took up position directly behind him, aiming the camera lens at the IT man’s fingers, and in full view of the screen.

  ‘Whose computer was he messing with, then?’ Darren asked.

  ‘I think his name’s “Lud” something . . . Ludlow?’ ‘Ludgrove,’ Darren said. He brought up the remote access screen and double-clicked on Ludgrove’s name. His fingers touch-typed a password. Zak couldn’t make it out, but he was confident that his camera had recorded the IT man’s fingers on the keyboard. He switched off the phone and turned his attention to the screen.

  Darren was scrolling backwards through a list of all the actions performed on Ludgrove’s computer, each line coded with the time the action was performed. A Google search at 11.38. An email sent eleven minutes before that. Darren continued to scroll, and as nothing out of the ordinary presented itself, he didn’t stop until he reached 8.27. Just minutes, Zak worked out, after he had seen Ludgrove’s screen.

  08.27 File deleted

  File deleted

  File deleted

  File deleted

  08.26 File deleted

  File deleted

  File deleted

  Darren didn’t seem to find anything unusual. ‘Looks kosher,’ he said. ‘Still, I’d better tell Ludgrove if you think someone was fiddlin’ . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Zak said quickly and with a friendly smile. ‘I’m going back up there now. I’ll tell him.’

  The IT man looked uncertain for a moment. Then his eyes flickered towards his Call of Duty terminal. ‘Sweet,’ he muttered lazily, and he slouched back to his game.

  By the time Zak left the room, the sound of gunfire had returned to the basement, and Darren, his face once more bathed in the light of the screen, was deeply engrossed in the serious business of killing people.

  What had Ludgrove thought Zak had seen that made him delete all those files from his computer? The files had to be somewhere, and Zak strongly suspected they had something to do with all this. The question of how to find them occupied him all the way back up to the seventh floor and Hendricks’s messy desk. He found Hendricks himself carefully arranging his coat on the back of his chair. He didn’t notice Zak until he spoke. ‘All sorted.’

  Hendricks jumped, and looked a bit flustered, first at Zak, then at the coat. He glanced around conspiratorially. ‘Oldest journalist’s trick in the book,’ he whispered. ‘Pop your coat on the back of your chair, everyone thinks you must be in the office somewhere. Just off for a spot of . . . well, Mum’s the word, eh, Harry m’boy? Hold the fort here, there’s a good fellow . . .’

  ‘Liquid lunch, Rodney?’ a female journalist with a black bob asked slyly on her way to the Ladies.

  A mixture of outrage and embarrassment crossed Hendricks’s face. He opened his mouth to protest, then clamped it firmly shut again.

  ‘I’ll stay here, Mr Hendricks,’ Zak said, doing his best not to smile. ‘Finish logging the sparrows. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘That’s the spirit, Harry m’boy. That’s the spirit.’ Hendricks shuffled off in the direction of the lift while Zak took a seat. He confidently predicted that his boss wouldn’t be back for a good couple of hours. That should give him ample time to do some snooping.

  He looked over his shoulder to see Hendricks waiting for the lift. But something else caught his eye too. It was Ludgrove. He was standing six or seven metres from Harry’s boss, next to a water cooler and slightly concealed by a tall pot plant. Zak’s line of sight was blocked, but he could still just catch the look in Ludgrove’s eyes as he stared at Hendricks. It was a look of deep suspicion, and absolute hatred.

  The lift arrived and Hendricks stepped in. Before the lift doors could close, however, Ludgrove was there, slipping inside more deftly than Zak would have suspected of somebody with his lumbering, brutish frame. As the doors hissed shut, he felt suddenly uneasy. If Ludgrove suspected Zak of something, he might think Hendricks was involved. He could easily try to beat some non-existent information out of the bumbling old nature-notes editor, and as Zak well knew, Ludgrove had form. He shot across the open-plan office, ignoring the strange looks from the startled journalists working at their desks. By the time he reached the lift, he could see that it had alre
ady reached the sixth floor. The stairwell was to his right. He ran towards it and hurtled down all seven flights, four steps at a time.

  He was sweating when he emerged into the reception area, but he was just in time. The lift doors opened. Zak wasn’t quite sure what he expected to see – now that he was down here it seemed unlikely that Ludgrove would have done anything untoward on the actual premises of the Daily Post – but although Hendricks looked uncomfortable, he also looked unharmed. Zak lowered his head and stepped behind a pillar as the two men emerged. With relief he saw Hendricks leave the building, while Ludgrove walked up to the reception desk and started talking to the receptionist.

  That relief soon fell away.

  Hendricks had barely stepped out of the Daily Post building when Ludgrove broke off his conversation with the receptionist. She looked rather confused as he walked away from her and left the building. Through the glass frontage, Zak could see Hendricks walking west along Delfont Street, Ludgrove following him at a distance of about thirty metres. Zak hurried to the exit and joined the convoy, following Ludgrove at a similar distance.

  He wished Raf and Gabs were with him. They had spent many a windswept afternoon on the island practising tracking techniques, but there was the world of difference between identifying the prints of wild animals and trailing a fully alert human being in an urban environment. Extra eyes would have been invaluable. Trailing someone who would recognize you if you got eyes on was hard. Get too close, you risk being seen. Not close enough and it was easy to lose your quarry. Zak really didn’t want that to happen, although he couldn’t have said why. Just that vague sense that if Ludgrove caught up with Hendricks, something bad would happen, and it might well be Zak’s fault.

  But there was no Gabs. No Raf. Just him. He concentrated hard on the job in hand.

  The streets were not as busy as they might have been. Hendricks had stepped out early, and as it was only just past twelve very few of the local office workers were out on their lunch break. It was busy enough, however. Zak found himself zigzagging across the pavement to stop the oncoming pedestrians blocking his line of sight on Ludgrove. His target turned left at the end of Delfont Street. For ten seconds, as Zak sprinted to the street corner, both Hendricks and Ludgrove were out of view. He picked them out again as he turned the corner. About thirty metres up ahead, Hendricks was approaching a pub. Zak expected him to enter it for his liquid lunch, but to his mild surprise he walked straight on, seemingly unaware that he had two people following him.