Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 (7 page)

‘Do you think he found out about the Pimlico bomb using his hacking skills?’ Raf asked. He sounded a little less surly now. Perhaps Zak’s debrief had persuaded him that this whole mess wasn’t somehow his protégé’s fault.

‘Undoubtedly,’ Michael said. ‘Our only hope now is to pray that he recovers enough to tell us what else he knows. Otherwise we’re groping in the—’

‘Wait,’ Zak said.

The other three looked at him. He clenched his eyes shut, struggling as an idea formed in his head. He was remembering something Gabs had said to him only this morning.

Governments and intelligence agencies spend millions every year on encryption and decryption software more advanced than a human mind could ever hope to achieve. Telephone calls across the Atlantic are constantly monitored for trigger words. Same goes for emails
 . . .

He opened his eyes again. ‘Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight, right?’

The others nodded.

‘If you wanted to get a message to someone – say, where and when a bomb was going to go off – and you were worried about it being intercepted, you could try complicated encryption, or you could just put it somewhere nobody would ever think of looking.’

‘Such as?’ Michael asked. He had an intent look on his face.

Zak shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘A newspaper crossword, maybe?’

Three sets of eyes stared at him.

‘Go on, Zak,’ Michael murmured.

‘Malcolm had them pinned to his wall. He said that thing about other people ignoring them. I think . . . I think we should look at those crosswords. Say, for the last week. See if there’s anything there. Any message.’

For a moment, Michael didn’t reply. He glanced towards the door to the operating theatre. Zak felt Raf and Gabs’s eyes on him. They were sceptical. But neither did they seem to have any better ideas.

Finally, Michael spoke. ‘Do it,’ he said. ‘Malcolm will be safe here.’

With that, he walked down the corridor and disappeared.

You have a problem
.

The words appeared in real time on the screen of a laptop. The man sitting at the laptop thought carefully for a few seconds before tapping out his reply.

I don’t think so. Everything happened as I planned. You decoded my message?

He waited.

There is a hacker. His name is Malcolm Mann. My sources inside British Intelligence tell me he tipped them off about your first bomb. Luckily for you, he was ignored
.

A link appeared on the screen. The man clicked it. It led him to a Press Association newswire. Shots reported outside Harrington Secure Hospital, South London.

Harrington Secure Hospital is Malcolm Mann’s last known place of residence
.

The man sucked on his teeth as he wondered how to reply:
Coincidence?

Don’t insult my intelligence. It’s up to you, but if I was in your position I would want to be sure that nobody had solved your little puzzle
.

The man felt his eyes narrowing. Perhaps his electronic pen pal had a point.

If the code had been cracked, there was only one place it would lead anybody. So he decided to watch that address. From the peg behind the door he removed a raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat. Then he left his simple apartment, making very sure to lock the door carefully behind him.

Back at the flat in Knightsbridge, Zak supposed he should sleep. It was five a.m. after all – almost dawn – and it had been, by anybody’s standards, a long day.

But there was no chance of that. Not with a puzzle like this in front of him.

Once he and Gabs had showered off Malcolm’s blood and changed into fresh clothes that were waiting for them, it had been a moment’s work to download and print out the
Daily Post
’s crosswords for the past ten days. Raf and Gabs had humoured him for an hour by staring at them with blank faces. ‘Sweetie,’ Gabs had said just before they went to bed, ‘I’m not sure this is time well spent.’

But Zak didn’t agree. He had yesterday’s crossword solution in front of him. He jabbed a finger at one of the solutions. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘One down.’ The word was BOMBING.

‘That means nothing, Zak,’ Gabs had said with one hand laid gently on his shoulder. ‘It’s just a word. Two down is OATMEAL. Are you telling me the next attack’s going to be in a porridge factory?’

‘Very funny.’

‘Anyway,’ Gabs continued, ‘the bomb went off first thing in the morning, before anybody could even do the crossword.’

‘No,’ Zak objected. ‘Don’t you remember? Malcolm called his psychiatrist at 0100 hours. The early editions of these papers come out the night before. He could have seen the crossword online . . .’

Gabs had given him a slightly sympathetic look. ‘You’re tired, sweetie. We all are. Let’s get some sleep, hey?’

Zak had rubbed his eyes. ‘Sure,’ he had said with a sigh. ‘In a minute.’ But a minute had turned into an hour, and an hour had turned into two. For all that time, Zak had stared at the crossword, somehow convinced he was on the edge of something, but not sure what.

Six o’clock came. Having stared at it for so long, he could see the crossword grid in his mind:

Was there a sentence to be made up of these words? If there was, he couldn’t see it. His mind focused on the word UKRAINIAN. Michael had talked about the Americans, the Chinese and the Iranians. Was there some other involvement? Was the word ASYLUM significant? It was, after all, an old-fashioned word for a secure hospital. He Googled some words he didn’t know: ABKHAS, people who lived around the Black Sea; GALEI, a kind of shark. But no matter how long he stared at this puzzle, or at any of the others, no patterns or clues emerged. Gabs was right. He was following the wrong lead.

He stood up and walked across the room. There were large floor-to-ceiling windows here, looking out over London. The sun was rising and he could make out all the familiar landmarks: the BT tower, the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace. From this high-up vantage point, he could see what looked like insects flying in the distance: military choppers, keeping watch over the capital. Zak wondered what they hoped to see. They were probably, he thought, just there to give the
impression
of security, when the truth was that London was very far from being secure.

When the truth was that London was under attack.

He thought back to the history lessons Raf and Gabs had been giving him. When people imagined London under attack, they thought of the Blitz at the beginning of the Second World War. But times had changed. Enemies had changed. Now, they were more likely to plant a bomb underground than drop it from the skies. Malcolm had been right. It seemed more cowardly, somehow. And much, much harder to prevent.

His eye was drawn north to Camden, where he used to live and where his cousin, Ellie, still did – no thanks to Cruz Martinez, who had done everything in his power to kill her. She was only alive now thanks to Raf and Gabs. But she was alive, while Cruz was dead and his loathsome henchman Calaca was mouldering in prison.

His eyes picked out the area around Pimlico Station. From this distance there was no trace of the bombing . . .

He stopped.

Pimlico. Bombing.

Something twigged.

Zak hurried back to where he had been sitting. He double-checked something he was already sure of: the position of the word BOMBING in the crossword.

One down.

What if Malcolm hadn’t been referring to his own imminent demise, when he had whispered these words?

What if he had been giving them a message?

He grabbed a pencil and, on a sheet of scrap paper, wrote the two words, one on top of each other.

He cast his mind back to the lesson Gabs had given him just the previous day. The one-time pad. What if there was some kind of code, hidden here in plain sight? He scribbled down the alphabet, A–Z, with the numbers 0–25 underneath each letter in turn.

It took him less than a minute to work out the key necessary to turn the word BOMBING into the word PIMLICO.

Zak stared at the cipher. Once again, Gabs’s words rang in his mind.
The person writing the code and the person deciphering it need this key
 . . .

He shook his head. He was still clutching at straws, trying to see something that wasn’t there. Raf and Gabs were right. He should get some sleep. It felt like random strings of letters were dancing in front of his eyes.

Zak was about to push the crossword to one side when it jumped out at him. He blinked heavily and his mouth went dry with a sudden surge of excitement. He peered more closely at the grid and then, in a flurry of activity, scribbled out all the ‘down’ solutions after the first one.

And with a slightly trembling hand, he drew a circle around the first letters of these words.