Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2 (23 page)

The ship lurched again, forcing Zak, Bea and the others to grab the railings. By the time they could stand freely again, Acosta and his mysterious companion had joined them. Even close up, Zak couldn’t make out the stranger’s face through his hood. And when he spoke, Zak had to strain his ears to hear over the elements, because his voice was very soft.

‘Acosta,’ he said. He had an accent. There was something very familiar about it. ‘Give me your knife.’

Acosta’s eyes grew bright. He no longer looked scared, but eager. As if he was looking forward to something. He handed his vicious blade over to the stranger, who examined its sharpness and the jagged hooks on the underside from behind his hood. Zak
noticed that his hand was very thin. He wore a signet ring on the fourth finger, and he was holding the knife forwards now. Like he was ready to strike.

Zak felt his muscles tensing. The crew members had surrounded him. He wondered if he could jump over the side of the ship and land in the lifeboat, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that the little boat had drifted out to sea.

Movement. Bea had stepped up next to him. He sensed that she was ready to fight …

Zak raised his voice over the wind. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ he shouted. ‘But you haven’t brought me and Bea all this way just to kill us.’

The men surrounding them looked surprised that he’d dared to speak to the stranger in this way. Acosta just sneered.

It was the last thing he ever did.

The stranger wasn’t even looking at the
Mercantile
’s skipper when he stabbed him. He just flicked out his right arm and slid the blade into the side of his abdomen. Acosta’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came. He stared at the hooded figure as he yanked the blade out again. Zak turned his head away in disgust. The hooks of the knife had pulled out several long, stringy gobbets of flesh – Acosta’s insides, which the stranger flicked off the knife with irritation. Acosta hit the deck. He
was holding both hands over the wound, but he couldn’t stem the blood that was flowing out like a river.

‘It should have been a simple thing,’ the hooded figure announced over the noise of the storm as Acosta’s life ebbed away, ‘to find out the identity of our guest. A
very
simple thing. And if somebody who works for me cannot do a simple thing, they don’t deserve to work for me any longer.’

Zak blinked. He’d placed the stranger’s voice.
He knew who it was
.

‘It’s very important to have the right people around you,’ the stranger continued. ‘That’s what my father always said, wasn’t it, Jason Cole? Or should I say Harry Gold? Or Zak Darke? Or even Agent 21? Not that it’s really very important, because the only name that’s going to matter to you is the one they put on your tombstone once I’ve killed you. Your real tombstone, that is …’

Acosta was at the stranger’s feet, surrounded by a pool of blood that mingled with the sea water on deck to produce a slippery, runny mess. Zak paid it no attention. He was too busy staring as the stranger removed his hood to reveal a face he recognized. A couple of years older than Zak himself. Black hair. Dark eyes. Tanned skin.

Cruz Martinez.

The boy who blamed Zak for the death of his father.

The boy Zak had befriended and betrayed.

The last person Zak had expected to see here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Hello, Harry,’ Cruz said in a voice that was almost devoid of emotion. ‘It’s so good of you to join us.’ He looked over at the remaining crew members. ‘Take them down below,’ he instructed. ‘We have a good deal to talk about before I finally sling his dead body overboard.’

20

POSITIVE ID

‘WHO IS HE?
’ Bea shouted.

‘An old friend.’

‘You want to choose your friends a bit more carefully in future.’

Yeah
, Zak thought. Only the first time he’d met Cruz Martinez he had been an awkward, gangly teenager – a bit surly, sometimes, but not the kind of kid to stand up for himself. Certainly not the kind of kid to instil fear in anybody. He’d changed. Big time.

Zak realized that Bea was still shouting at him. ‘He didn’t
look
very friendly. You know, the way he stuck that knife into Acosta’s guts and everything.’

They were in some kind of storage deck. It stank. A thick, greasy, petrol-station smell that made Zak feel nauseous.
Fuel
, he thought to himself. There were certainly a number of large red jerry cans stashed up against one far wall and held in place by a series of
thick ropes. Aside from these jerry cans, there was nothing else. The ceiling was about three metres high and a single light bulb was suspended in the middle from a wire. The listing of the ship caused the bulb to swing, which made the shadows move around like they had a life of their own. The space was four times the size of Zak’s cell on the
Mercantile
, but it was more than four times as terrifying. Here, in the bowels of the ship, they could hear the violent waves crashing against the metal hull. It boomed and echoed like a drum. The noise was constant and it vibrated through to Zak’s core and made his ears numb. His throat was raw too – he felt like he’d done nothing but shout against the storm, and he had to yell even louder to be heard down here.

The entrance to the storage deck was via a big metal door. Zak was examining it as the ship listed and swayed. Just before Cruz’s men had thrown them in here, he’d checked the bolt on the outside. Simple but heavy, and impossible to open from in here, even if he had tools, which he didn’t. There was no way they’d be breaking out of this prison.

‘Yeah,’ he shouted back at Bea when he realized she was still waiting for an answer. ‘When I say an old friend, I suppose what I really mean is … an old enemy.’ He paused. Wasn’t he too young to have enemies? And anyway, Zak had never thought of Cruz
in that way before. He relived the moment his former friend had killed Acosta. Zak had no love for the brutal skipper of the
Mercantile
, but his death had been so sudden. So violent. And carried out with such lack of emotion. The memory made him shudder. That wasn’t the Cruz he had known. But then, the death of a parent can change you. Zak knew that better than most.

He knew something else too. The two of them being together on a blank patch of sea, miles from land wasn’t –
couldn’t be
– a coincidence. Had Cruz been tracking him? Following him? Waiting for the moment to pounce? Or was there another explanation?

Suddenly the door opened. Cruz appeared. Zak noticed that he still had a smear of blood on the skin of his right hand. Acosta’s blood, but
el capitán
wouldn’t be needing it any more. Behind Cruz stood two heavily tooled-up crew members. Assault rifles. Pistols in their belts. Enough hardware to take out a platoon of soldiers, let alone two unarmed kids. Bea looked scared, and for the first time Zak didn’t reckon she was faking it.

There was a silence. Zak broke it.

‘Black Wolf?’ he shouted.

‘A sideline of mine,’ replied Cruz. ‘It pays to diversify. I admit, it would have been inconvenient if you had sunk the
Mercantile
and its little cargo. I can
replace men, of course, but diamonds are a little more precious.’

‘They told me I should fear you, Cruz,’ he shouted.

‘
Si
, Harry.’ Cruz appeared very calm. ‘They were right.’

Zak nodded in the direction of the two armed men. ‘Maybe it’s just the two guys with guns I should fear. Do you go everywhere with them? Or are you willing to talk man to man? Just the two of us.’

Cruz smiled. ‘Like gentlemen, Harry? How very British. But it wasn’t very gentleman-like, was it, how you deceived my father and me—’

‘Your father,’ Zak interrupted, feeling the anger flush to the surface of his skin, ‘killed my parents. And he killed a lot more people besides.
You
don’t have to be like him …’

Zak’s words were like a spark, igniting Cruz’s own fury. He stepped into the room. With a strength that Zak would never have expected of him – the last time he’d seen Cruz, he’d been anything but muscular – he grabbed Zak by the neck and pushed him against the back wall of the cabin. Zak hit the hard metal with a thud. He felt Cruz’s fingers tighten around his throat.

‘Don’t tell me what I should be,’ the Mexican hissed. ‘Because whatever I am –
you
made me.’

With a flick of his arm, he threw Zak down onto
the ground. Zak scrambled to his feet again to see Cruz’s dark eyes flashing as he inhaled deeply several times to regain his composure. The young Mexican strode back to his bodyguards and nodded curtly at one of them. The bodyguard handed over a thin sheaf of papers, which Cruz delivered to Zak with a dead-eyed look. ‘Imagine how surprised I was when that animal Acosta sent me a photograph of the kid who was trying to blow up my ship, and I saw that it was
you
, Harry – the one person in the world I’ve been trying to find all these months. And imagine my delight when I realized I would be able to show you these. I’m sure you’ll find them interesting.’

It was only when Zak had them in his hands that he realized the papers were in fact A4-sized photographs. He examined the top one. It was in colour, but very grainy, as though it had been enlarged several times. That didn’t stop Zak from recognizing what it was, however. And it didn’t stop him from taking a sharp breath.

63 Acacia Drive was just as he remembered it. The front lawn was covered in a blanket of snow. Uncle Godfrey’s Mondeo was parked on the driveway. It looked very bland. Very ordinary.

The front door was open and walking out of the house was a girl. She was wearing a dark winter coat and snow boots, and had a rucksack slung over her
back. Her face was blurred, but not so blurred that Zak couldn’t recognize it.

‘Ellie,’ he breathed.

He looked up at Cruz, who was staring at him with a satisfied expression.

Zak started thumbing through the rest of the photographs. Ellie featured in all of them. Walking down Camden Road. Outside the gates to the school Zak used to attend in what seemed like a different life. In some of the pictures he could make out her face; in others her features were indistinct but Zak could tell it was Ellie from the slope of her shoulders or the way she angled her head. He flipped through the images faster and faster. The more photos he viewed, the more panic rose in his chest.

The final picture, however, made his blood freeze.

It showed the inside of a fast-food joint. There were a couple of customers in the background, but Zak, of course, wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at Ellie, sitting at a table with a polystyrene drinks cup in front of her. It had to be Diet Coke, because that was what she always ordered. But there was someone else sitting opposite her.

And Zak recognized him too.

The patch over Calaca’s right eye did nothing to disguise him. Not from Zak, who had seen this monster close up; who had looked into his face as the
one-eyed man prepared to kill him; who had only just escaped from him using a combination of training and good luck. He didn’t really know if good luck was something with which Ellie was blessed; but she
hadn’t
had Zak’s training. Which meant that if Calaca was in her vicinity, she was in danger. Very grave danger indeed.

The sides of the hull boomed and echoed. Zak looked up slowly from the picture, his face as hard as the metal of the ship. ‘What’s he done to her, Cruz?’ he asked flatly. He didn’t shout this time, but Cruz appeared to hear every word perfectly. He stepped forward so they were no more than three paces apart.

‘
Done
to her, Harry?’ He was smiling slightly. ‘So far, nothing. Not yet.’ A look of pretend confusion crossed his face. ‘Although I must say, I had expected news of her death even before I learned that you and I were to meet again. You see, Harry, I’ve been looking for you. And where better to start than with your family? Once Ellie had directed Calaca to your so-called grave, his instructions were to kill her. I told him it was so that she would not be able to identify him again, but I admit to feeling some satisfaction that you would probably hear of her death, wherever you were. But then you played straight into my hands. Such a happy coincidence! As you know, Calaca is
extremely efficient. He knows how to contact me, and his instructions are to inform me the very moment he kills her. When that happens, it will be a moment we can share together, before I kill you too …’

Zak couldn’t stop himself. He threw the full weight of his body against Cruz’s. The two of them went flying, landing on the metal floor with a brutal thump. Before Cruz could even think about fighting back, Zak had one knee on his chest and his fist clenched above his face. ‘You’d better get one thing straight, Cruz. Your men might fear you, but
I
don’t. I
know
you. And if anything happens to Ellie, if she gets a single scratch on her knee because of you, I swear I’ll—’

He didn’t get to finish, because by then Cruz’s bodyguards were on him. One of them kicked him in the stomach, knocking the wind from his lungs, while the other grabbed a clump of his hair and pulled him away from their boss. Cruz jumped to his feet. His face was angry. More than angry. There was madness in his eyes.

‘You won’t be a position to do
anything
, Agent 21.’ He said these last two words almost as if they were poison in his mouth. ‘I’d kill you now, but I want to see the look on your face when you learn that your cousin is dead. I want to see you suffer, like I suffered, before you die.’ The mad look in his face grew even
more insane. He turned to look at Bea. ‘In the meantime,’ he said, ‘while we are waiting for word that Calaca has done his work, maybe I’ll give you something else to think about.’

He didn’t even look at his bodyguards as he gave the order.

‘Kill her,’ he said. ‘Now!’

The bodyguards exchanged a glance.

‘NOW!’ Cruz roared.

‘Get behind me!’ Zak shouted at Bea. Cruz’s guards were both raising their weapons. ‘
Get behind me!
’