Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3

by Chris Ryan

  Gabs threw him a look of utter loathing, but the man seemed immune to it.

  ‘Why?’ Raf asked quietly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Why are you doing this? What can you possibly hope to gain from all this slaughter?’

  ‘Satisfaction!’ the man snapped. ‘After all these years!’

  ‘All these years of what?’ Raf’s voice was measured and calm – a stark contrast to the bomber’s, which was shrill and excitable.

  ‘All these years of loneliness!’

  ‘And you think killing people is going to earn you friends?’

  The bomber spat in contempt. ‘I don’t want friends. My brother was my only friend, and he was taken from me years ago. I swore I would avenge him.’ He looked upwards. ‘And now I will.’ He started to edge away from them, into the darkness.

  ‘Tell me about your brother,’ Raf persisted.

  The bomber stopped. ‘He was more of a man than you.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘What does it matter to you?’ the bomber hissed. But then, almost unable to stop himself, he said: ‘His name was Richard.’

  ‘He sounds like quite a guy,’ Raf breathed.

  ‘He deserved better.’

  ‘What happened to him, mate?’

  The question seemed to tip the bomber over the edge. ‘You don’t know what happened to him, because they covered it up!’

  ‘Who covered it up?’ Raf pressed.

  ‘The army. The government. Everyone!’ The bomber glanced at the clock ticking down. 00:58:03. It was almost as if he was deciding whether he had the time to tell his story. ‘We were the best,’ he said, whispering now and taking a step towards Raf and Gabs. ‘He taught me everything I knew about bomb disposal, but together we were the best.’

  Another step forward.

  ‘There was a car bomb. Northern Ireland. We knew it was too dangerous to defuse. We walked away. But some Rupert forced him into it. Said he’d get someone else in. Richard knew that if anyone else tried it, they’d die, so he went in.’

  ‘That was brave,’ said Raf.

  ‘It was more than brave,’ the bomber snapped. ‘They should have given him a medal. A proper military funeral. They didn’t. They wrote him out of history to keep it quiet.’ A pause. ‘But they’re paying now.’

  He was standing five metres from Raf.

  ‘What’s your name, mate?’ Raf said.

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘Fine,’ the bomber said. ‘Call me Rodney.’ His voice changed suddenly. ‘Rodney Hendricks,’ he said in a self-mocking voice. ‘Birds this, nature that . . . everyone thinks Rodney’s a fool, but none of them saw through my little disguise. And birds can kill. Even something as insignificant as a little chaffinch.’ He started laughing, as if at some private joke. If he noticed the glance Raf and Gabs gave each other, he made no sign of it.

  ‘Rodney,’ Raf said. ‘Where are we? You might as well tell us, if we’re going to die anyway.’

  Hendricks stopped laughing. ‘I found my way down here years ago,’ he said. ‘I’ve been planning this ever since but until now I had no funds to pursue my aims. That changed, and my little conflagration on the underground killed many people, while destroying the hospital was spectacular, but believe me, nobody will forget today.’

  ‘Where are we, Rodney?’ Raf repeated.

  ‘Underneath the Palace.’ He pointed at the ten crates of explosives. ‘There’s enough here to bring the building crumbling in on itself. My brother fought for Queen and country. They betrayed him, so what better way is there to avenge him?’

  Hendricks was breathing deeply. There was excitement in his voice. He stood there for a moment, looking not at Raf and Gabs, but at the crates.

  ‘Why the crosswords, Rodney? What made you want to send those coded messages.’

  ‘Let’s just say I needed to prove my worth to a wealthy patron whose aims coincide with my own. I have always wanted to avenge my brother, but I’m afraid terror costs money – money that I’ve never had, until now. Don’t imagine for a moment that the British establishment has seen the end of me. Quite the opposite. Once I have more funds at my disposal, the fun’s really going to start.’

  ‘And Richard?’ Raf asked quietly. ‘If he was here, what would he tell you to do?’

  Hendricks looked sharply at him. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me, Rodney? He was a soldier. A good one. Would he think this was fun? Would he would thank you for killing innocent people in his name? Do you think that’s what he would want his legacy to be.’

  ‘His legacy is what it is,’ said Hendricks.

  ‘But you can change it, Rodney. You can make him the hero you know he is. You understand that, don’t you?’

  The question hung in the air between them. Hendricks’s breath became shorter. Quicker.

  ‘Defuse the device, Rodney,’ Raf whispered. ‘Do it for Richard.’

  Hendricks stared at him. Then he stared at the clock counting down.

  It felt as if the world was holding its breath. Gab and Raf certainly were.

  The bomber’s lip curled. ‘Impossible,’ he breathed. ‘Once it’s primed, any attempt to defuse it will spark a detonation. And in any case, why would I think of allowing you to live. You two, the only people in the world who know my little secret.’

  ‘Not the only ones, Rodney,’ Gabs told him. ‘Not for long. Our people have eyes at the Daily Post. It won’t take them long to work it out.’

  ‘I never told you I worked at the Post,’ Hendricks shot back. And then, suddenly, his eyes widened. ‘Harry Gold,’ he breathed. He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Don’t try to deny it, lady. I can see the way your jaw clenches, and how you refuse to catch my eye. It was stupid of me not to guess before. Why else would tedious, disregarded Rodney Hendricks be sent a work experience boy. Unless, of course, he was there to spy on him. Or on our erstwhile friend Ludgrove?’ He smirked. ‘You see how well I understand the way you think? Well, don’t worry, my friends. I’ll make short work of a kid like Harry. Just like I did with the Puzzle Master and Ludgrove himself.’ He sneered. ‘I see you are shocked. But remember, I was a soldier before I was a bomb-disposal expert. I was taught to kill. And Ludgrove was digging into the old story, beginning to discover my true identity. He had to go . . . As will young Harry.’

  ‘Don’t count on it, sweetie,’ Gabs breathed.

  But now Hendricks was receding into the darkness. Raf shouted at him: ‘Hendricks! Hendricks!’ But the bomber simply grinned at him and didn’t reply. He switched off his torch. Everything went quiet, apart from the scurrying of the rats and the sound of Hendricks’s receding footsteps. And everything went black apart from the blue glow around the digital display:

  Zak felt almost paralysed. He needed to raise the alarm. But how? He heard Michael’s voice in his head. The authorities receive tip-offs galore, most of them from cranks and time-wasters. It’s normally the case that genuine tip-offs can be confirmed by more than one source. That’s the way intelligence-gathering works. If Zak went to anybody and told them there was about to be a bomb blast at Buckingham Palace, and he knew because there was a secret message in a daily newspaper, chances were that he’d end up in Harrington Secure Hospital with Malcolm.

  But he had to do something.

  He paced the room, his face screwed up with concentration. Hendricks – or Lee Herder, to give him his real name – liked spectacular gestures. If he was going to hit Buckingham Palace, this wasn’t going to be some feeble indoor fireworks display. It was going to be big. But surely such a place would be heavily guarded? Surely security would be tight? To lace Buckingham Palace with enough explosives to do the kind of damage Hendricks so clearly wanted to do was, if not impossible, surely un-feasibly difficult.

  So how would he do it?

  The answer came to him in a flash. Underground. That was the bomber’s modus operandi. He’d planted the Pimlic
o bomb in an underground tunnel. He’d planted the hospital bomb in the basement. What if, somehow, he’d gained access to the area beneath Buckingham Palace?

  ‘Oh my God . . .’ Zak whispered.

  ‘What?’ Malcolm asked.

  ‘I know what he’s done. I know where the explosives are.’

  ‘Where?’

  But Zak didn’t reply. Not directly. ‘They need to evacuate the palace,’ he said. ‘Even if the Queen’s not there, there must be any number of innocent people working in the building.’ He swore under his breath. ‘If only Michael was here. Or Raf and Gabs.’

  ‘Who are they?’ Malcolm asked.

  ‘Friends,’ Zak muttered. And he thought: my only ones.

  ‘I can do it,’ Malcolm said.

  Zak blinked at him. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Make them evacuate Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ asked Malcolm.

  Zak thought about that. ‘You can’t leave the flat. You’re not strong enough.’

  ‘I don’t need to,’ said Malcolm. ‘All I need is that.’ He pointed at the computer.

  ‘Are you going to do something illegal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you going to hurt anybody?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fine,’ Zak said. ‘Do it.’

  He left the room. There was a store cupboard in the hallway, in which Zak found a torch. Where he was going, the light of a mobile phone would be no good.

  ‘Harry!’ Malcolm called out to him.

  Zak put his head round the corner of the room. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  Zak nodded. ‘You too,’ he said. And without another word – without even stopping to arm himself – he left the flat, hurtled down the stairs and burst out onto the rain-soaked street.

  Malcolm took a seat at the computer. He winced sharply with the pain of raising his right arm to the keyboard, but once he had rested his fingers on the keys, they were a blur as he typed.

  His first action was to direct the browser to his personal ftp site. From there, he downloaded a small program he had written two years ago and used many times since. As the file was downloading, he brought up a list of the top 100 Twitter users worldwide. The first five were pop stars. Number six was the US president. More pop stars after that. The truth was that it didn’t matter who they were. Once he had hacked into a few of these accounts – a trivial matter for him – and used the accounts to tweet the same message, that message would go viral. Worldwide, hundreds of millions of people would be reading it within seconds. The message would be impossible to ignore.

  He started at the top. His program hacked the account in approximately fifteen seconds. Malcolm typed his message. There is an explosive device in Buckingham Palace. It will detonate today. #palacebomb

  Without hesitation, he clicked send.

  Within five minutes he had hacked the top ten accounts. He instructed his browser to follow the #palacebomb hashtag. Malcolm couldn’t resist a smile when he saw that his message was being retweeted tens of thousands of times a second.

  He sat back in his chair and continued to watch it go viral.

  Zak headed east.

  The roads were surprisingly busy for the small hours, with armed police and soldiers in evidence, grim-faced in the driving rain. It hardly looked like London any more. Or rather, it looked like London in some horrible future.

  He pounded towards Victoria, clutching his torch. It took him twenty minutes to reach the station, where he turned north and headed up towards the offices of the Daily Post. The lights in the reception area were on, and two rather bored-looking security guards were on duty, both reading newspapers. Standing on the street and looking up, Zak saw that the lights on the seventh floor were also on. It crossed his mind that Hendricks might be there, but he decided it was unlikely. Besides, he didn’t have time to look. He needed to concentrate on retracing his steps of the previous day. He remembered how Ludgrove had followed Hendricks west along Delfont Street. They had both been out of sight for a few seconds once they turned left at the end of the road, and Zak had been surprised to see Hendricks walking past the pub and not going into it. Hendricks had crossed the road at the zebra crossing while a taxi had beeped at Zak for stepping out onto the road . . .

  He continued to retrace his steps, stopping only to wipe the rain from his face.

  He stopped.

  On the other side of the road, obscured by the darkness, the rain and the passing of cars and buses, was a figure. His head – camouflaged by a wide-brimmed hat – was down and he wore a heavy raincoat. Zak couldn’t see his face, but he was sure the man’s gait was familiar. Torn with indecision, he watched the figure hurry up the street in the opposite direction. Then he shook his head. Time was precious. He needed to stick to his guns.

  Before long he was approaching the entrance to the dead-end mews. It was here that Ludgrove had spotted Zak following him.

  And it was here that Hendricks himself had seemed to disappear into thin air.

  Nobody could disappear into thin air, though. There had to be another explanation.

  He stepped into the road – Chalker Mews – just as a flash of lightning split the sky overhead, followed by a clap of thunder that made his bones shake. He kept walking, peering left and right in the gloom. There were no doorways, and there was only a single car parked on the left-hand side. At the end of the mews was a high wall – five metres at least, impossible to scale without help. But Zak’s intuition told him that Hendricks hadn’t headed up when he’d disappeared.

  He’d headed down.

  There was a solitary circular manhole cover just in front of the wall. The only one in Chalker Mews, so far as Zak could see. He looked over his shoulder – more out of habit than anxiety. Nobody else was here. He bent over and, as the rain ran down his neck, he dug his fingernails under the rim of the manhole cover.

  With rain streaming into his eyes, he levered the metal disc up onto its edge, then let it fall to the side of the manhole. It clanged against the cobblestones.

  Zak kneeled at the edge of the hole, switched on his torch and shone it inside.

  20

  BLACKOUT

  THE FIRST THING Zak saw by the beam of his torch was a ladder. It was not built into the cavity to which this manhole gave access, but propped up against an underground brick wall. An ordinary builder’s ladder, not too dirty. Someone had put it there, and recently. It meant Zak was on to something.

  Carefully, he lowered himself into the hole, feeling for the steps of the ladder with his feet. Once he’d found them, he climbed down, leaving the manhole open. It didn’t give him much light, but it made him feel safer. A bit.

  The ladder took him down about three metres. As his feet touched the ground he saw movement from the corner of his eye and heard a scurrying sound as whatever creatures lived down here escaped the glare of his torch. He tried to put the thought of rodents from his mind, but of course that only made them loom large in his imagination. He gritted his teeth and stepped away from the safety of the manhole cover, where the heavy rain was seeping in.

  More movement. More rustling.

  He pressed on.

  The underground corridor in which he found himself was narrow – less than a metre wide. Zak’s skin shrank away from the clammy walls and he had barely walked five metres before he felt the need to pull his T-shirt over his nose because the smell down here was getting worse and worse. The sound of the rain hammering on the road above gradually faded away. The silence was chilling. As he walked further, he started to hear a dripping sound as well as the rustling of rats. It echoed against the underground walls.

  After about fifteen metres, he came to a T-junction. He had to make a decision. Left or right?

  For a brief moment he was back on St Peter’s Crag, at the very beginning of his training. Raf was teaching him how to navigate and Zak had suggested the easy option of using the GPS on his phone. ‘GP
S is good,’ Raf had said, ‘but you can’t rely on it.’

  Looked like his Guardian Angels had been right. Again. He felt a sudden pang. A feeling of dreadful loss. Where were they? What had happened to them? He put those thoughts from his mind. He knew they wouldn’t want him to get distracted now. There were more important matters at hand.

  He pulled up a mental map of his location. From the route he’d taken from the offices of the Daily Post, he figured he was somewhere to the north-west of Victoria Station, and heading east. It meant he needed to turn right.

  He took a deep breath. For the second time he was going hunting for an explosive device. He’d been lucky last time. Very lucky. There was no way he could be sure that his luck would hold again. He felt a sudden ache of fear, a moment where his courage almost deserted him. Perhaps he should go back. Leave London. Get to safety. Chances were that his Guardian Angels were dead. Zak ignored these thoughts. He’d made his decision. He turned right.

  The corridor widened out. Zak found himself wondering what this network of tunnels was. Sewers? Rainwater sluices? He’d heard people talk about Victorian drains under the streets of London. Maybe that’s what these old corridors were. He tried not to think about the weight of bricks above him. He just pressed on.

  Time didn’t exist down here. He had no idea how long he walked. The tunnel bore round to the right, then opened up into a kind of chamber about half the size of a tennis court. There was no hiding for the rats in here. Even when they scampered away from the torch beam Zak could see their thick, furry bodies and whip-like tails. He set his jaw and continued through this sea of squeaking, scuttling rodents.

  Another corridor, bearing round to the left this time and running slightly downhill. Zak was growing used to his surroundings, so he picked up speed.

  He stopped.

  The corridor had opened out again into another chamber. It was much larger than the previous one – perhaps five times the size, though it was difficult to be sure in the gloom. He could see the outlines of a number of boxes, about two metres high, two metres wide and two metres deep. On top of one of them was an object, about the size of a paperback book, and from which a pale blue glow emanated.