Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 (19 page)

The relief was short-lived. As Zak turned his full attention back to the man’s face, he realized he knew who it was.

He let the sight fall, blinked at the hanging silhouette, then returned the sight to his eye to make sure he wasn’t mistaken.

He
wasn’t
mistaken.

Sirens continued to ring in his ears. The horns continued to beep. Zak gaped open-mouthed at the bridge, trying to work out what it all meant.

Trying to work out why, and how, the corpse currently hanging from the railings of Westminster Bridge could possibly be Joshua Ludgrove, chief defence correspondent of the
Daily Post
, all-round bad egg and the only person Zak had in the frame for the devastating attacks on London, and the chaos that had ensued.

As Zak reeled in confusion, not far away – only a few miles – a man was busy. It was dark down here. As dark as night.
Darker
than night, in fact. With the total absence of light – he didn’t even illuminate his watch, so he could only guess that it was now about 9.30 p.m. – he was obliged to survey his prisoners using a pair of fourth-generation night-vision goggles. The NV goggles included an infra-red torch, which cast its light – invisible to the human eye – in a fan shape ahead of him, lighting everything up with a hazy green glow. But the prisoners, when they woke up, would not see anything. If he remained still, they would probably not even know he was there.

He sat, and watched, and waited. The only noise was the scurrying of rats, but he’d grown used to those hairy creatures with their long, greasy tails in the time he had spent here.

So much time. Such a lot of planning.

It was the woman who woke first. She had white-blonde hair which glowed pale in the NV. Her chin drooped onto her chest and her hair fell forward. As she roused herself, she lifted her head up and stared blindly into the darkness, her eyeballs glinting strangely in the infra-red beam of which she was totally unaware. She tried to stand, and it was only then she realized her hands were tied behind her back, although she had no way of knowing that they were also tied to an iron ring protruding from the clammy stone wall.

‘Raf?’ she whispered, her voice dry and hoarse. ‘Raf, are you there?’

He turned his attention to the man. He was stirring too, and at the sound of the woman’s voice, he groaned. ‘Gabs?’ he rasped.

Good. So now he knew their names. That was a start.

‘What happened?’ Gabs asked. ‘All I remember . . . the stairs . . .’

‘We were gassed,’ said the man called Raf.

‘That’s why I feel so sick,’ Gabs muttered. ‘I think someone hit me on the head too. I can feel a welt.’

It was true. He had hit them on the head. He didn’t quite know why, because the gas had been enough to keep them unconscious for several hours. It was just a sudden moment of anger towards these two people who had obviously been close to ruining everything.

Both Raf and Gabs tried – without success – to free themselves from their ropes. He knew their struggles would be in vain, but it amused him to watch them anyway. They struggled for about thirty seconds before falling still again.

‘Who was he?’ Gabs breathed. ‘The man in the mask, I mean.’

Raf shrugged in the darkness. ‘Who knows. Ludgrove, I suppose. It was his house, and he’s our number one suspect.’ He suddenly swore under his breath and yanked at the rope again. ‘How do we get out again? Where
is
this place.’

‘It doesn’t smell too good,’ Gabs observed, ‘and it’s damp. How long do you think we’ve been out?’

At the word ‘Ludgrove’, he had allowed himself a cold smile. He’d worried that they’d been on to him. But just as he himself had figured, the defence correspondent would be a likely suspect if anyone figured out the crossword clues. And so it had turned out. He needn’t have been concerned that he himself could have been a suspect. And Ludgrove, easily overcome when arriving home, was no longer any problem. He smiled at the memory. Another corpse on a rope. In plain sight too. But his problem now was these two. Perhaps he ought to kill them right now. He had a gun at his side and it would be a simple task. His prisoners would be dead before they even knew what was happening.

No
, he told himself. He had longed for this for too long to risk carelessness at this late stage. And he wanted the information they could give him about the final fly in his ointment . . .

‘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 razor 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.