Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3

by Chris Ryan

  ‘You may wish to know,’ he said in a quiet voice – he saw his two prisoners’ faces look sharply in his direction – ‘You may wish to know that it is a moment’s work for me to snuff out your lives.’

  A tense silence. The man called Raf spoke. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he breathed. ‘We can help you. It doesn’t have to end the way you think it might—’

  ‘Please,’ he cut in, his voice dripping contempt, ‘spare me the negotiation techniques. I’m probably as well-trained in them as you are.’

  ‘I doubt that, sweetie,’ the girl called Gabs murmured.

  ‘I saw you entering the house of that fool who calls himself the Puzzle Master. You had someone else with you. A boy, perhaps. I want his name, and I want to know where I can find him.’

  Even through the night vision, he could see their eyes tighten. Their lips, however, remained firmly closed.

  He allowed the question to hang there for thirty seconds, before tutting dramatically in the darkness. ‘You will tell me,’ he said, in a sing-song voice that he knew unnerved people. ‘Sooner or later, you will tell me.’

  They looked stubbornly ahead, but said nothing. It was time, he thought to himself, to allow them a little light. He pushed the NV goggles up onto his forehead and then, from a bag by his feet, he removed a powerful Maglite torch. He aimed at the the two prisoners and switched on.

  They hissed as the light burned their retinas and they clamped them shut. It took a minute or so for them to open their eyes wide again. He didn’t worry that they would be able to see him because he was behind the light and they were dazzled.

  ‘Look around,’ he breathed. ‘Take in your surroundings.’ He shone the torch up and down, left and right, and felt a certain amount of pride at the scene that it revealed.

  They were in a low-ceilinged space – he saw no reason to tell them exactly where it was – and they were surrounded by ten crates, all packed full of C4 plastic explosive, all linked, one to the other, by a metal wire. On top of one of the crates was a tiny detonator, much like the one he had planted in the hospital. It consisted of a digital clock face (as yet unlit), a small circuit board (of his own devising) and a space for a single AA battery. He pulled such a battery from his pocket and stepped towards the detonator. Holding the battery an inch above the detonator, he looked over at his two prisoners. ‘My advice,’ he whispered, ‘is to sit very, very still.’

  He gave it a couple of seconds for the instruction to sink in, then slotted the battery into place.

  The clock lit up and immediately started counting down.

  Everything was set.

  He switched off his torch and re-engaged the NV goggles. The clock glowed brightly, but he was more interested in his prisoners just now. ‘For your information,’ he whispered, ‘you are both sitting on a pressure pad. If you move off it, all ten of our little boxes will go kaboom. I’ll come back when you’ve had time to think things over, and I’ll allow you one more chance to tell me who else is on my trail. If you give me the information, I shall consider helping you leave the blast site. If not . . . let’s just say that your family won’t need to go to the expense of buying a box to bury you in.’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea, sweetie.’ The woman’s voice rang clearly in the darkness. ‘Seeing as we’re never going to tell you anything, why don’t I just jump up right now and take you with us?’

  He gave a short, sardonic laugh. ‘By all means,’ he said, calling her bluff. ‘I’ve been looking forward to my grand finale for some time now. Oh, forgive me, you don’t know where we are! Still, it hardly matters if you’re about to blow yourself up, does it?’

  As he spoke, he stepped backwards. He could still see the prisoners’ faces staring blindly, and he could tell from their expressions that they weren’t about to move anywhere.

  He turned his back on them and retreated, padding through the dark, dingy tunnels he had got to know so well.

  16

  EVORGDUL

  2230hrs

  IT WAS ONLY by chance that Zak found himself outside New Scotland Yard. He’d been striding blindly, sweat oozing from every pore of his body, his mind turning over. The sight of Scotland Yard, however, forced him to stop and clear his head. There wasn’t time to be confused. He needed to establish what he knew. To separate the significant from the insignificant. And he needed to do it now.

  Someone was planting bombs in London, and advertising them in cryptic ways. Why advertise them? He didn’t know. Two had already exploded, and there was likely to be a third. Someone had called the Puzzle Master from the offices of the Daily Post. Until now, Ludgrove was the prime suspect, but now he was dead. Suicide? Unlikely. Zak had met him only briefly, but he hadn’t seemed like a man about to kill himself. A murder unconnected to the bombings? Zak didn’t think so. That would be too much of a coincidence.

  All sorts of possibilities rose in his brain. Perhaps Ludgrove had been in league with somebody else, but had fallen out with his accomplice. Perhaps the journalist had stumbled upon something, and his very public execution was a warning to anybody else who might be on the trail of the bomber. That thought made Zak’s face harden. If the bomber thought he was going to scare Zak away like that, he had another think coming. Not with Raf and Gabs missing, and Michael in hospital. He wondered briefly, too, if Malcolm Mann had survived his gunshot wound. A boy he had failed to protect . . .

  One thing was sure. Somehow, and for some reason, Ludgrove must be at the centre of all this.

  It wouldn’t take the police long to identify the corpse hanging from Westminster Bridge. When that happened, they’d be swarming round his house like bees round a hive. Zak had to get there first, search the place, try to break into Ludgrove’s home computer before the police did. He screwed up his eyes and furrowed his brow. When Michael had been briefing them back in the Knightsbridge flat, Gabs had read out Ludgrove’s address. Where was it? Where was it?

  Suddenly he opened his eyes. He saw another black cab coming his way and flagged it down. Almost before the vehicle came to a halt he was jumping into the back and shouting urgently at the driver. ‘Six Galsheils Avenue,’ he said. ‘Tottenham.’

  2327hrs

  Galsheils Avenue was deserted. As the cab drove away, Zak strained his ears for the sound of sirens. He examined the vehicles parked on either side of the road as he walked towards number six, checking that none of them were in fact covert surveillance posts. He neither saw, nor heard, anything unusual.

  Zak didn’t have Raf’s skill at picking locks. His method of entry was more blunt. At the end of Galsheils Avenue was the entrance to an alleyway that ran behind the houses. Zak hurried along it, counting down until he came to number six. He scrambled over the garden fence, through the high grass of the unkempt garden, and up to the house. With a sharp jab of his elbow, he smashed a hole into the French doors that led out onto the garden. He waited a minute to check he hadn’t alerted any of the neighbours to his presence, but seconds after that he was in.

  He stood for a moment in the darkness of a musty-smelling dining room. What was he after? What was he looking for? He decided that his first goal had to be searching for Ludgrove’s computer. He stole down the hallway, checking the kitchen and the front room as he went – no sign of a desktop or laptop – then found himself at the bottom of the stairs.

  Two things caught his eye in the lamplight that streamed in through the frosted glass of the front door. The first was a canister, about halfway up the stairs. It looked not unlike a grenade, but he could see that it was spent because the pin had been pulled and the safety lever released. It obviously wasn’t a grenade, though, because the building was intact.

  And on the first step, there was something that brought a twist to his stomach. A diamond hairpin in the shape of a star.

  Zak’s eyes went flat. He picked it up, held it to the light and saw that it was smeared with blood. ‘Ow!’ he breathed suddenly, realizing he had cut himself. The edges of the star were ra
zor sharp. Trust Gabs to own a piece of jewellery like that. Beautiful and dangerous, the same as her.

  He put the hairpin in his pocket and climbed the stairs.

  The floorboards on the landing creaked but Zak concentrated on speed rather than stealth. He had to be out of here before the police arrived, as they surely would. Ludgrove had a home office at the front of the house and here, on a table surrounded by piles of papers and newspaper cuttings, was an old desktop computer. Zak sat down in front of it and turned it on. It seemed to take an age to boot up – the hard drive sounded old and clunky – and as soon as the operating system had booted, Zak was presented with his next hurdle.

  Enter password. Warning: incorrect password will trigger immediate system erase.

  Zak cursed. It meant he only had a single guess. Then he remembered: he also had something to go on.

  Zak removed his phone from his pocket. He swiped the screen, entered his passcode and navigated to his videos. The last piece of footage he had taken had been in the basement of the Daily Post as Darren the IT guy logged on to Ludgrove’s work system. Was it possible that Ludgrove used the same password for both systems? There was only one way to find out.

  Zak replayed the video paying close attention to the IT guy’s fingers. He was touch-typing as he entered the password, and as far as Zak could tell it was eight characters long. He watched the footage again, paying close attention to which finger typed each character. He grabbed a scrap of paper and a pencil that were lying on the desk in front of him and, for each character, scribbled down either L or R depending on which hand the IT guy had used, and a number from one to five, depending on which finger.

  L3

  L2

  R4

  L2

  L2

  L3

  R2

  R4

  Once his list was complete he laid his fingers across the middle of the keyboard. He had learned how to touch-type at school in what seemed like another life. He remembered a rather drab teacher telling him that it was like learning a bike – you never forgot once you had learned – and that he’d be glad that he’d taken the time to master it. Zak had rather doubted it at the time. Now he had to concede that his teacher had been right, but not for the reasons anyone could have imagined at the time . . .

  The IT guy had inputted the first character of the password with the third finger of his left hand. Zak looked at the keyboard, then wrote down the possible keys it could have been: 3 4 E D C. He did the same thing for the remaining characters until he had a grid of all the possible combinations.

  He stared at the characters, knowing that he needed to choose one from each row but unable to see any kind of pattern or keyword. Perhaps Ludgrove’s password was just a random string of letters. If so, Zak had no chance. He only had one attempt to get the right password. He began to panic.

  But then, as he stared at the paper in the glow of the computer screen, he saw it. Could it really be that simple?

  He circled one letter of each row.

  Then he read the highlighted letters from the bottom up: LUDGROVE.

  Could the password really be his name spelled backwards? Could it really be that simple? Zak breathed deeply, then carefully typed it in: EVORGDUL

  He pressed enter.

  The screen went blank.

  And then it flickered into life. He was in.

  There was no time to congratulate himself. The police could be here at any moment. Zak’s first instinct was to check the list of previously opened documents. It was empty. He cursed silently, and repeated his curse when he saw that the folder labelled ‘My Documents’ was empty. He didn’t have time to trawl the whole hard drive looking for information. Think, he told himself. What else do you know?

  He opened up a search window and typed in NY HERO.

  No results.

  He tried to stay calm, to put his mind back to the offices of the Daily Post. He hadn’t been sure that the final ‘O’ hadn’t been a ‘D’. He’d put that from his mind because NY HERD meant nothing to him. But now he typed these letters into the search window and pressed enter.

  Result.

  A link to a single document appeared. Zak double-clicked it, and for the next minute, he did nothing but read.

  The document was entitled ‘Richard Sonny Herder’ – NY HERD, he immediately saw, was simply part of that name. The name meant nothing to Zak, at least not until he read through what appeared to be an article Ludgrove was writing.

  On 18 June 1973, the British Army committed one of its least glorious, and least known, travesties of justice. Richard ‘Sonny’ Herder was, along with his brother Lee, a highly accomplished bomb-disposal expert working in Northern Ireland during one of the worst periods of the Troubles. Rumours have abounded among Dick Herder’s contemporaries about the manner of his death. Why did the Ministry of Defence go out of its way to cover up Herder’s death and the circumstances surrounding the car bomb that caused it? What is the truth behind the subsequent disappearance of his brother Lee? These secrets have remained buried for forty years. Now, after many months of research, and having spoken to eye witnesses who were there, I can reveal the full, shameful truth of what happened that day. Dick Herder’s death was caused not by his own carelessness, but because he was ordered to defuse a device that he himself had declared unsafe to approach. His story is a shocking indictment of the British Army, and the way it treats the memory of its fallen.

  But it is more than that. It is a story of deception, intrigue and subterfuge . . .

  Zak wanted to read on, but his attention was suddenly ripped away from the text on the screen. The window of this first-floor office looked out onto the road. And on the road, bathing the study in flashing neon light, were three police cars. He could hear men shouting instructions to each other.

  He stood up so abruptly that his chair toppled backwards. He grabbed the canvas bag containing his weapon and hurtled along the landing and down the stairs. There were shadows behind the frosted glass of the front door. As he reached the bottom of the stairs there was a sudden, shocking bang from the doorway. The door rattled in its frame and an image fell into Zak’s head of the police officers on the other side forcing it open with a pneumatic battering ram. He knew it wouldn’t survive another strike, so he didn’t hang around. Seconds later he burst out of the French doors, sprinted the length of the garden and scrambled over the wooden fence at the bottom.

  It was only as his feet slammed against the ground that he saw them: three officers, one of them holding an Alsatian on a lead, running down the alleyway in his direction. The dog barked; one of the officers shouted. They were no more than twenty metres away, and closing. Paralysed by panic, Zak stared helpless at them for a second.

  The dog barked again.

  ‘Get on the ground! Get on the ground!’

  Zak snapped out of his hesitation. A couple of metres behind him were two green wheelie bins. He scrambled on top of them, then hurled himself over the brick wall that formed one side of the alleyway. He fell heavily onto tarmac on the other side, but quickly scrambled to his feet again. He was in the car park of a modern red-brick church. It was deserted at this time of night, so he pelted across it, past the church itself and out on to a busy main road.

  He ran for thirty metres, dodging the occasional pedestrian, until he came to a bus stop. The doors of a red, single-decker bus were just closing as Zak ran up to them. He hammered on the door and shouted at the top of his voice: ‘Please, let me on!’ For a sickening moment he thought the driver was ignoring him, but then there was a hiss as the doors concertina’d open.

  Zak slapped his Oyster card – in the name of Harry Gold – against the reader and scurried down the bus, looking over his shoulder and half expecting to see armed police bearing down on him.

  But then the doors hissed closed. As the bus drove away, he staggered to the very end, feeling the glances of the other passengers keenly. It may have been a trick of the light, but he thought he saw a uniform
ed man with a dog appear at a distance of about twenty metres.

  Or maybe it was just a pedestrian. Zak had no way of knowing as he took a seat, placing the canvas bag carefully on his lap. He tried to recall everything he had read on Ludgrove’s computer. Richard ‘Sonny’ Herder . . . ‘Dick’ to his friends . . . died in a bomb blast 18 June 1973.

  18 June 1973 . . .

  Zak looked at his watch. 1159hrs. With a kind of sick anticipation he watched the seconds tick down.

  0000hrs. 18 June.

  His mouth went dry. He closed his eyes. His mind was a confused pot of loose ends and half theories, but one fact burned brightly. Today was the fortieth anniversary of Herder’s death. Ludgrove had been writing a story about that death, and if the terrible events of the past few days were linked somehow to that bomb blast of forty years ago, there was no reason not to think that the third bomb could be scheduled for today.

  But Ludgrove was dead. He could give him no answers now.

  Zak sat there with his eyes shut, thinking carefully about what his next move had to be.

  18 JUNE

  17

  THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT

  MIDNIGHT.

  Normally a good, quiet time to be working in a hospital. Not tonight. Tonight it felt as if there were no good times to be working in a hospital. Tonight it really did feel like the graveyard shift.

  First the underground bomb. Dr Cooper had been on call as the gruesomely injured bodies had been carried into surgery. Three of them had died under his care, and as a doctor it didn’t matter how many lives you saved, it was those you lost that you always remembered.

  Then the children’s hospital. There wasn’t a single member of staff here who hadn’t watched the footage on television of its destruction. And there wasn’t a single member of staff who didn’t wonder if their place of work was going to be next.