Agent 21: The Wire (2 page)

The engine next to him cuts out. He hears the sound of doors opening. The blindfold is ripped from his head. ‘Get out,’ says Scott.

He does as he’s told, and in a few seconds takes in everything he can about his surroundings. They are at the foot of a tower block that’s maybe twenty storeys high. It’s made from stained grey concrete that matches the sky. At the entrance an old lady in a headscarf, dragging a faux-leather shopping trolley, stops and stares at them. Scott and his crew pay no attention. They escort Zak into the tower block and up thirteen flights of stairs. There’s an unpleasant smell here, and the concrete draws any warmth out of the air. The stairwell is luxurious, however, compared to the flat they take him to.

Scott unlocks four deadlocks before he can open the door. Holden pushes Zak roughly inside. He trips over the loose carpet as he enters, but manages to keep upright. He finds himself in a studio flat. There is a kitchenette in one corner and a window opposite. The glass is so grimy that he can’t see out. There is a scurrying sound. Rodents. The air is filled with the smell of their waste. Zak thinks he sees a scaly tail slither away into the bathroom. He thinks of his mother – long dead, the same as his father. She hated rats.

There are four hard flight cases piled up against the right-hand wall, each the size of a large suitcase, each heavily bolted with two large padlocks.

Weapons and ammo
, Zak thinks.
Bingo.

*

‘It works like this,’ Raf said. ‘We tape the wire along the length of your arm. It has a tiny microphone at one end, which we’ll
position five centimetres above your wrist. The transmitter unit will be taped to your stomach.’

‘Won’t that hurt when the time comes to rip the tape off?’

‘Yes,’ said Raf. ‘Quite a lot, actually. Problem?’

‘Just asking,’ said Zak, a bit defensively.

‘Targets don’t normally notice the bulge of the transmitter pack. It’s small – half the size of a smartphone – and we tape it down very thoroughly. It’s the wire itself that’s more likely to be spotted, especially if you have a loose sleeve.’

‘It’s a fashion minefield,’ Gabs added. ‘So many things for the style-conscious spy to take into account.’

*

‘So what you after, Harry Potter?’ says Scott.

‘Harry Gold,’ Zak corrects him.

‘Whatever.’

‘Let’s see what you got,’ Zak says.

‘Fair enough, blood.’ Scott nods at his two companions. They unstack the four flight cases – Zak can tell they are heavy – then accept sets of keys from Scott, which they use to unlock the bolts. Finally they open up the cases, like chefs removing silver domes from their latest creation.

Scott walks up to the first case, bends down and removes a handgun. ‘Colt M1911,’ he says. ‘Calibre .45. Packs a punch. Yours for five hundred, including rounds.’

Case number two. ‘Ruger SP-101 double-action snubnose revolver. Very small. Easy to hide.’

Case number three. ‘Browning Hi-Power. My own personal favourite.’

He grins as he approaches case number four. ‘Uzi 9mm submachine gun,’ he says. ‘For when you want to kill everybody in the room.’

Zak does what he can to keep his loathing for these gun-pushers off his face. ‘Let me see the Uzi,’ he says.

‘Pricey,’ sneers Scott. ‘Set you back a thousand.’

‘Let me see it.’

Scott nods, makes a big show of removing the magazine from the gun’s body. ‘Just in case you were thinking of killing everybody in this room,’ he jokes. At least, Zak thinks it’s a joke.

He takes the unloaded gun from Scott and makes a show of feeling its weight. He holds the handle in his right hand, straightens his arm and aims the weapon at the dealer.

A look of grudging respect crosses Scott’s face. ‘You’ve used one before. Usual idiots I sell these things to, they’ve never even fired a potato gun.’ He laughs at himself, and Zak can tell he’s relaxed slightly by the way he absent-mindedly traces the razor lines in his hair with his forefinger.

But he stops laughing pretty quickly.

Zak still has his right arm extended. Scott’s eyes narrow. He’s noticed something.

The dealer moves incredibly quickly. He steps forward, grabs Zak’s right sleeve and yanks it up. The wire, taped to Zak’s arm with sturdy grey duct tape, is suddenly on full display.

Zak closes his eyes. He knows what’s coming, but that doesn’t make it any easier to endure. The blow Scott deals to his stomach is well placed, just below the ribs, knocking the air from his lungs. He doubles over and gasps, desperately trying to suck in some oxygen. He feels Scott’s knee jab sharply into his face, and falls to the floor. Curling up into a foetal position, he hopes they’ve decided they’ve inflicted enough pain.

They haven’t.

The three boys are merciless as they start kicking Zak when he’s down. Every part of his body is battered. He holds his hands over his face to protect his nose and teeth, but that only means that the rest of him is vulnerable. The beating continues for two minutes. It feels like two hours.

‘Stop!’ Scott barks, just when Zak feels he can take no more.

There’s a sudden welcome silence in the room. Zak half opens his eyes to see Morton and Holden closing up the flight cases. Locking them. Stacking them. He feels something drip down his forehead, and it’s only when a droplet of red splashes onto the dirty carpet that he realizes it’s blood, not sweat. He’s dizzy with the pain, and wants to be sick, but he has to keep a clear head. He knows that a mistake now could be fatal.

He hears Scott’s voice. He’s on the phone. ‘It’s me . . . Scott . . . We’ve got a pig, trying to catch us out . . . Nah, don’t think so, just a kid. We’ve dealt with him, he ain’t going nowhere . . . Yeah, we proper sorted him . . .’

A pause.

‘All right,’ Scott says into the phone, and for the first time he sounds a little unsure of himself. ‘We’ll be there in half an hour . . . Yeah, all right, twenty minutes . . .’

Zak can barely move, but he doesn’t have a choice. He feels his captors pull him up into a sitting position. They rip off his jacket, and then his T-shirt, to reveal his torso and the listening equipment so carefully taped to it. After the kicking he’s received, Zak isn’t at all sure that the transmitter is still functioning. His captors aren’t taking that chance. They rip the duct tape sticking the wire to his body, and it feels to Zak as though it’s pulling his skin with it.

Once the transmitter is in their hands, they stamp on it, grinding the tiny device under their heels until it is clearly of no use to anyone.

‘Put your clothes back on, pig,’ Scott tells Zak. ‘You’re coming with us.’

‘Where to?’ Zak rasps.

An unpleasant sneer creeps its way onto Scott’s face. ‘To see Rasnovic,’ he says.

*

‘Anton Rasnovic. Wanted in his native Poland for three counts of murder, and two of attempted murder. Truth be told, the men he killed were the lucky ones.’ Gabs’s face was grim as she continued the briefing. ‘The two attempted murder charges relate to a pair of sisters. It’s not quite clear what they did to upset Rasnovic, but whatever it was, they paid a heavy price. There’s a basement in his house on the outskirts of Warsaw. The sisters were found hanging by
their wrists from ropes attached to meat hooks in the ceiling. They’d been there for about forty-eight hours.’

‘About?’ Zak asked. Gabs was normally a lot more precise.

‘They couldn’t say. They were so traumatized by their experience that they suffered some kind of amnesia. It appears that he beat them very severely while they were hanging there. Their wounds were beginning to go septic. Any longer, and they’d have been beyond medical care.’

‘This Rasnovic character has a penchant for ropes,’ added Raf. ‘It’s a nasty way to go. So what we’re saying, Zak, is that you don’t want to end up in a situation where Rasnovic has time to get creative on you.’

‘No,’ Zak agreed. ‘I don’t think I do.’

*

They force him back into his clothes, hustle him down to the car and blindfold him again.

This time, Scott takes the seat next to him in the back, and for the duration of the journey, Zak can feel the butt of his captor’s Browning pressed against his raw, bruised ribs. He feels unreal. Weightless. He feels as if he is running on the hot fear in his gut. Images pass through his head. Horrific images. Women close to death, hanging from meat hooks. He tries once more to concentrate on the direction of the car, but he’s overcome by nausea and it’s impossible to know where he is.

This journey is shorter than the first. Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty? Impossible to say through the pain. The car comes to a halt. His captors don’t bother removing the blindfold this time. They just manhandle him out of the vehicle. He feels himself being dragged
down some steps. His shins bang against the cold stone. To take his mind off the pain, he counts each one. Fifteen steps, then a door at the bottom. He hears it open in front of him and slam shut behind him. A lock in the door. He’s alone.

Zak scrambles to remove his blindfold. He’s in some sort of cellar. There’s no electric light, but he can see a bit thanks to a ventilation hole by the ceiling. He listens carefully. No cars, no pedestrians. Wherever he is, it’s out of the way. He makes a quick calculation. Forty-minute car drive from Acton. Twenty minutes to here. At the very most, he’s an hour’s drive out of London.

But lots of places are an hour’s drive from London.

He isn’t given the leisure to consider it any further. The door opens. A figure appears silhouetted in the doorframe. He is tall. So tall that he needs to stoop in order to enter the room. As he does so, his features become clearer. Like Scott and his crew, this man has a shaved head, but there are no razor marks. He does not seem like the kind of man to bother with decorating himself. He is older – in his late thirties, perhaps – with sunken eyes and a pronounced Adam’s apple. He stands there for a few seconds before speaking. His voice is a high-pitched whisper, and he has a pronounced Eastern European accent. It’s not the kind of sound you want to listen to for long, especially when you know, as Zak does, that it must belong to Anton Rasnovic.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he says.

‘I doubt it,’ Zak replies.

A cold, cruel smile crosses Rasnovic’s lips. ‘You are wondering if whoever was listening in to your pathetic wire device – which my men have now completely destroyed – managed to trace you to the tower block in time to follow you here. I should tell you now that they didn’t. You were not followed, and the great advantage of our
current location is that I can see anybody approaching by road from at least a mile.’

Silence.

‘You have nothing to say about that? You are still feeling brave?’

‘Not brave, Rasnovic. But I can’t pretend I don’t feel a little bit disgusted. Can’t you find a better way to make a living than selling guns to kids? Normal people find that distasteful, you know.’

Rasnovic’s smile grows broader. ‘Good. You have a little fire in your blood. I like a challenge. There is very little enjoyment to be had from questioning a subject who squeals at the very first turn of the screw.’

In the dim light, Zak sees a dreadful gleam in Rasnovic’s eyes. A hunger, almost.

‘My people will prepare you. That won’t take long. It’s the bit that comes after that will feel like it lasts for ever. You’ll be very grateful to me when I finally agree to end your life. But I won’t be doing that until you tell me who you work for, and where they are.’

Rasnovic steps backwards out of the door, returning to the darkness. Seconds later, Scott and his crew crowd in. They don’t speak, but for the second time in less than two hours they lay into Zak, kicking and punching his already bruised and aching body. Finally they tell him to stand up. It’s all he can do to stay on his feet as they drag him out of the cellar, and into an adjoining room.

There is more light in here – a fierce, blinding beam from a spotlight in the corner of the room. Along the far wall is what looks like a hospital bed. There are hooks in the ceiling, and Rasnovic – tall, thin and stooped – is there, holding a coil of rope.

‘It was very good of you,’ Rasnovic says, ‘to dress up in your best clothes. Scott tells me he offered to buy your shoes, and you refused.’

Zak juts out his chin at his tormentor, but he feels his jugular pulsing.

‘Take them off,’ Rasnovic says.

‘No.’

There is a dangerous silence.

Rasnovic steps forward, still clutching the rope. Zak sees that the end of it is tied into a hangman’s noose. And out of the corner of his eye, he sees that Scott is pointing his Browning in Zak’s direction.

There is nothing for it. He kicks off his shoes.

‘Good,’ Rasnovic breathes.

Scott scampers forward and grabs the trainers. Neither he nor Rasnovic nor any of the others seem to hear what Zak has been listening to for the past forty-five seconds. The distant but unmistakable thunder of a helicopter’s rotor blades.

And then it all starts up.

*

‘You need to be prepared for things to happen quickly,’ Raf told him. ‘If Rasnovic and his crew have the slightest idea that we’re on to them, we can’t predict what they’ll do. Do you know what this is?’

He held out a metal canister, about the size of a Coke can, with a lever along one side and a pin in the top.

‘Grenade?’ Zak asked.

Raf nodded. ‘But not a fragmentation grenade. It’s called a flashbang. When it detonates, it emits a blinding white flash and an extremely loud bang . . .’

‘The clue’s in the name,’ Gabs said.

‘A flashbang will totally disorientate you if you’re not expecting it. We use it to give ourselves a few seconds’ advantage when we’re forcing an entry.’

A pause.