Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 (11 page)

‘We have a feed into the hospital CCTV,’ Michael said. ‘Bomb-disposal personnel are going in now. They’ll have robotic cameras, we’ll have a feed into those too when they’re operational.’ He pinched the area between his eyes. ‘But it’s a big hospital,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get it evacuated in time . . .’ His voice trailed off.

‘We should help with the evacuation,’ Gabs said.

Michael and Raf nodded. ‘Zak,’ Raf said. ‘Stay here.’

‘I want to come. I can help.’

Gabs shook her head. ‘No way, sweetie,’ she said. She reached out and brushed his cheek with the back of her hand. ‘You’ve done enough. Now you need to stay safe.’

‘But—’

‘It’s an order,’ Michael said abruptly. ‘We don’t have time to argue.’ He looked at the other two. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Seconds later, Zak was alone apart from the surveillance operator.

He paced the inside of the van impatiently. He felt useless, stuck there in the middle of it all and yet unable to do a thing.

‘If you’re going to pace, pace outside,’ said the surveillance guy. Zak cast him a black look, but the man wasn’t paying any attention to him – he had eyes only for his screens. The noises outside continued to blare. Zak had heard the chopper rise off the ground, but it sounded like it was still circling above the hospital and he looked outside to check. There it was – a great black beast keeping watch over this chaotic scene.

The bomb-disposal guys were now heading into the hospital. The sniffer dogs were behind them, pulling frantically at their leads. They showed no sign of fear – the dogs were clearly well trained to deal with situations like this – and when their handlers let them go, they scampered into the entrance. The hospital staff were still wheeling out the beds of sick children. Zak looked around. To his west, the River Thames with the Houses of Parliament on the other side. Closer at hand, paramedics tending to the terrified young patients, and armed troops barking at members of the public to stay back.

Was the bomber watching, Zak wondered? Was he waiting for the moment to strike that would cause the most harm?

One of the soldiers caught his eye and gave him a confused look. Zak had no ID, nothing to say he was permitted inside the cordon, so he quickly stepped back into the van. Out of sight, out of mind. He hoped.

He looked at the screens. The images of the hospital’s interior were sinister – being silent, they gave no soundtrack to the chaos within. Zak had a bizarre recollection of watching
Big Brother
on TV. While the contestants had been sleeping, the cameras had shown silent, empty corridors. The CCTV in the upper levels of the hospital looked similar, but every few seconds the screen was filled with a moving bed and drip stand or, on one occasion, a nurse carrying a small bundle that could only be a sick baby. Zak could barely watch. He turned his attention to one of the other screens.

‘Dog’s going crazy,’ the surveillance guy said. He was right. One of the German Shepherds looked as though he was chasing his tail. ‘Happens sometimes. They get spooked. They’re trained to give certain signals if they find something, but that one’s a waste of space. Dogs’ home for him. What you doing here anyway, son?’

‘Just along for the ride,’ Zak breathed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the German Shepherd. Something wasn’t quite right. ‘Where’s that dog?’

‘Ground floor,’ said the surveillance guy. ‘Corridor on the north side.’

‘Can you zoom in on it?’

‘What is this? Pets’ corner?’

‘
Can
you?’

The surveillance guy gave him a slightly confused look, then shrugged and turned a dial on the VT equipment in front of him. The CCTV camera focused in on the German Shepherd. Zak peered more closely at it. Even in this grainy image he could see that the dog’s eyes were bright, its ears sharp. It stopped suddenly, and although Zak couldn’t hear it, he could see the dog bark as its handler surveyed the area, clearly looking for a place where a bomb could be hidden. But it was just an area of open floor. The dog cocked its head, and for a moment seemed to look directly into the camera at Zak. But then it started chasing its tail again.

‘That dog’s not spooked,’ Zak muttered, just as the handler gave a thumbs up to the CCTV and gestured the dog to move on.

‘What you say, son?’

‘That dog’s not spooked. I’m sure he’s found something.’

But the surveillance guy didn’t hear any more of what Zak had said, because by the time Zak had finished speaking he’d already jumped out of the back of the van.

9

CASUALTY OF WAR

ZAK NEEDED TO
tell someone. Fast.

As he jumped back out onto the pavement, he scanned quickly around for Raf, Gabs or Michael. There was no sign of them. He ran in the direction of the hospital entrance, but he was fifteen metres away when he found his path blocked by a sturdy figure in DPMs carrying an SA80. Before he knew it, a steely-faced soldier was barking at him: ‘
Get back! Behind the cordon! Now!
’

Zak opened his mouth to argue, but he clamped it shut just as quickly. There was nothing he could say that would make the soldier believe he was supposed to be on site. That it was thanks to him all this was happening anyway. He held up his palms in surrender and stepped backwards. As soon as the soldier saw that Zak was retreating, he turned away. Zak hurried back to the van, slipped behind it, waited a few seconds, and then approached the hospital from a different angle. He kept his head upright and his stride purposeful. He needed to look like he was supposed to be here. And, after all, everyone was being evacuated; the only people walking towards the scene were those with jobs to do.

There was an ambulance parked between the van and the hospital. Its rear doors were open and an empty stretcher bed was stationed just behind it. The paramedics from the ambulance itself were not there – presumably they were tending to the evacuated children whose beds were still crowded around the front of the hospital. Zak moved almost on instinct. He jumped into the back of the ambulance where he immediately located a high-visibility medic’s jacket and a blue cloth surgeon’s face mask. He quickly put them on, hoping that they would hide how young he looked, then exited the ambulance and pushed the empty stretcher bed in the direction of the hospital.

There was a parting in the middle of the sea of beds, a narrow path that led straight to the entrance of the hospital. Zak manoeuvred the stretcher bed along it, fully prepared to be challenged at any moment. But nobody did. Before he knew it, he was inside.

The reception area was not as full as it had been when Zak had looked at it on the monitor, but it was still chaotic. Red-faced soldiers were barking commands at scared-looking hospital staff; those few children whose beds remained here were still crying. Zak took a moment to get his bearings. Left was north. The surveillance guy had said that the sniffer dog had been on the ground floor. If Zak’s instinct was right, that meant he had to get down to the basement. He looked over towards the lift. There was a set of double doors just to its right, and a blue sign saying ‘Stairs’. Still pushing the stretcher bed, he headed towards them. He smashed the bed through the double doors and then, while they were still swinging shut, abandoned it and hurtled down the stairs three at a time.

Keep your bearings
, he told himself.
Head north
.

Fraser Willis couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. He was a grown man, after all. But he was on the edge of tears now. All he wanted to do was to get out of the hospital. To safety.

All he wanted to do was make sure that he didn’t die.

Fraser would have run away already if it hadn’t been for the anti-terrorist officer in the leather jacket. He always seemed to be there, keeping his steely eye on Fraser. He was bearing down on him now, as Fraser stood, sweaty-palmed, in the almost empty reception area with one eye on the exit.

‘The kid in the isolation ward.’ The officer started talking loudly before he had even reached Fraser. ‘We’ve no isolation suits in the vicinity. What are our options?’

Fraser tried to clear the panic from his head. ‘I . . . I may be able to find something,’ he stuttered. ‘There’s a storeroom in the basement . . . perhaps . . .’

The officer’s lip curled. ‘Are you telling me,’ he hissed, ‘that you had an isolation suit here all the time?’

‘I . . . I can’t be sure . . . very confusing, all this . . .’ He felt his eyes drawn once more to the exit.

The officer grabbed the frightened hospital administrator by the scruff of the neck. ‘Find it,’ he growled, before pushing him away.

Fraser almost fell. He scampered backwards, then scurried towards the double doors to the right of the lift. He ignored the stretcher bed that somebody had abandoned at the top of the stairs and hurried down into the basement of the hospital. He moved quickly, not because he feared for the life of little Ruby MacGregor on the fifth floor, but because he feared for his own.

* * *

Zak tried not to think of the weight of the hospital building above him, or of how totally he would be crushed if the device he was hunting detonated now. It wasn’t easy. He passed two empty wards and a storeroom, all the while trying to work out his position in relation to where he had seen the dog chasing its tail. At the end of the corridor was a closed door. He burst through it and took a moment to look around. It was some kind of locker room. It reminded him a bit of the changing rooms at the swimming pool his mum and dad used to take him to – benches along the middle, with hooks above, and metal lockers along each wall. He presumed that this was where the hospital staff got changed.

Zak looked up. The ceiling was a grid of square plaster panels. Removable. For a moment he was back at Harrington Secure Hospital, hiding in a linen cupboard and wondering when he had become the sort of person who looked at a ceiling and saw an escape route, or a place to hide.

A place to hide
 . . .

He swallowed nervously and tried to rid himself of the cold sensation that ran through his veins. Then he stood on one of the benches, stretched up on tiptoes, and pushed gingerly at one of the panels.

It moved.

Zak edged the panel to the left so that a square opening appeared in the ceiling. He grabbed two edges of the opening and hauled himself up. The muscles in his upper arms burned, but he had enough strength from Raf and Gabs’s intensive training regimes back on the island to pull himself up and into the ceiling. The cavity between the plaster panels and the underside of the floor was about a metre deep, which meant he had to stay in a crouching position. He was slightly out of breath now, but the pumping of his pulse was down to anxiety, not exertion. He blinked. He had fully expected it to be dark up here.

But it wasn’t.

There was a blue glow. It was approximately ten metres away. Zak took a deep breath to calm himself, then carefully started crawling in the direction of the glow.

He had a good idea of what he was looking at by the time he was five metres away. But he crawled up close to the glow just to be sure.

It was a small digital display, half the size of a mobile phone. The blue glow came from the numbers on the display. They were counting down.

Zak stared at the display for a moment, almost paralysed with the shock of knowing he had found the detonator. His fingers edged towards the display, but they were a centimetre away when he stopped himself from touching it. He scrambled in his pocket for his mobile phone. With a couple of taps of the screen, he had turned the camera flash into a high-powered torch beam. He shone it at the display to reveal two wires leading from it. The display itself was balanced on a tiny see-saw mechanism, and there were wires leading from this too. Zak instantly saw that if he had touched it, he would have triggered the booby-trapped device.

Barely daring to move, he allowed the torch beam to follow one of the wires. It ran along the ceiling for a couple of metres before reaching a thick steel post, sturdy enough, Zak reckoned, to be part of the skeleton of the building. He followed the wire upwards. When the torch beam reached the underside of the ground floor, he stopped and, despite himself, drew a sharp intake of breath.

They were everywhere.

The cakes of plastic explosive were strapped to the underside of the ground floor with thick black gaffer tape. Each one was about twenty centimetres by twenty, and Zak couldn’t even count them all – at a glance he estimated that there were more than fifty. No wonder the sniffer dog was going wild on the floor just above. Whoever had planted these explosives had concentrated on the area around the steel post, and another one a few metres beyond it. Zak was no engineer, but he could immediately tell why: bring down these weight-bearing structures, and you’d bring down the whole building.

His eyes flickered back to the detonator.