Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 (2 page)

Three things happen almost at once.

Lee shouts. He can’t help himself. ‘
NO!
’

The chaffinch knocks the wire leading from the detonator.

And the car explodes.

The noise of the explosion is ear-splitting. The thought crosses Lee’s mind, as he is thrown backwards five metres by the thunderous, pulsating shock waves, that it must surely be audible from thirty miles away. As he lands with a thump onto the cobbles, he feels a strange regret for the death of the chaffinch. But it is only as the dust starts to fall that the brutal truth hits him, harder than any shrapnel.

His brother
.

Lee pushes himself up to his feet and staggers through the dust cloud, unable to see clearly more than a couple of metres, but aware of a fiery glow where the Ford Capri had been. The closer he comes, the brighter it glows. And hotter too. When he is five metres away, he stops and falls to his knees. The heat scorches the skin of his face even underneath his mask, but Lee doesn’t care about that. He finds himself praying that his brother had managed miraculously to escape before the detonation, but he knows that’s a vain hope. And it’s not only because he witnessed the moment of the blast.

It’s because two metres from where he kneels he can see the stump of a dismembered leg, burning like a well-seasoned log on a winter’s night.

It’s all that remains of Dick ‘Sonny’ Herder, the finest bomb-disposal guy Her Majesty’s army had to offer . . .

THE PRESENT DAY

15 JUNE

1

THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME

‘ARE YOU HERE
to kill me?’

The boy’s voice didn’t sound scared. Curious, if anything. And calm. Ready for what was to come.

Agent 21 peered through the darkness. In his right hand he held a 9mm snubnose and he knew, if it came to it, that his hand would be steady.

‘Because if you’re going to kill me,’ the boy continued, ‘please do it quickly. A shot to the head should do it. I won’t feel that.’

A pause.

‘At least, I don’t
think
I will,’ he said.

Agent 21 gripped the handgun a little harder. The safety was off. The weapon was loaded.

He’d had no idea when he’d woken up that morning that this was how his day would turn out.

* * *

But then,
nobody
had any idea when they woke up that morning how the day would turn out. Not least Amelia Howard who, eighteen hours earlier, had left her home in Brixton in order to catch the first train into central London.

Amelia had been making this journey every day for the past nine years. She often noticed that the other commuters who joined her on the platform looked a good deal less happy than she was to be up at this early hour. It was always the same faces, and the faces were always the same: gloomy, tired, un-enthusiastic. Amelia was the opposite. She enjoyed her job working at a children’s home in Islington. Oh, it didn’t pay very well, but she felt as though she was making a difference, and that was what mattered.

The arrival of the train was preceded by a rush of air from the tunnel. It messed Amelia’s hair, but that didn’t worry her. She was pretty, but not the type to worry too much about her appearance. While other women on the tube held tiny make-up mirrors to their faces and fixed their lipstick, Amelia was more likely to be lost in a book. It made the journey pass more quickly.

The train thundered into the station and the doors hissed open. Amelia stepped into one of the middle carriages and took a seat. A man in a suit sat on her right, an older woman on her left. Amelia took her book from her handbag, placed the bag behind her feet and started to read.

It was her habit to look up from the pages every time the train slowed down. That way, she could see each stop slide into view and keep track of where she was on her journey. So it was that she saw Brixton become Stockwell, where she immersed herself once more in her book, then Stockwell became Vauxhall, and she looked up a minute later as the train slowed down on its approach to Pimlico.

But Amelia did not realize she had already seen Pimlico station for the last time.

The explosion that rocked the train was immense. It shocked Amelia in two distinct ways. First, the noise. There was a series of eruptions in quick succession, each one sounding like a firework detonating an inch from her ear. And then the movement. She felt the train derailing, then a moment of sudden nausea as the front of the carriage rose two metres in the air.

The lights went out. Amelia could only see on account of the sparks outside as the carriage scraped against the tunnel wall. By that faint orange light, she could see the terror in the faces of her fellow passengers as they gripped the arms of their seats tightly.

The screaming started at about the same time that the walls of the carriage buckled. What had seemed so tough and sturdy crumpled like tinfoil and burned like paper. The glass windows cracked and shattered. Amelia had never seen anybody die before, but now, by the scant light of the sparks, she saw a shard of twisted metal drill into the chest of the woman sitting next to her, and felt the splatter of blood on her face. Amelia fell forward onto the floor.

The train had been moving all this time, but now it came to a halt. There was a moment of sinister silence – the passengers had stopped screaming – and it was utterly dark. Amelia groped around for her handbag with trembling hands. When she found it, she pulled out her mobile phone and turned it on. The screen glowed, lighting up the gruesome sight of the dead woman who had also fallen to the floor, and whose dead eyes were staring up at her.

Amelia wasn’t the only person to light up a phone. All along the carriage, screens glowed like little beacons. They dimly revealed a scene of total devastation – and Amelia’s neighbour wasn’t the only dead body: she saw the grey silhouettes of corpses all around. She looked at the back of her hand. A shard of glass from one of the shattered windows had sliced it open and blood was slipping down onto the sleeve of her lightweight jacket.

Little by little, the soft sound of weeping filled the carriage. Amelia staggered to her feet – not easy, because the floor of the train was at an incline. ‘We . . . we should move to the front of the carriage,’ she called out shakily.

Nobody heard her. Because as she spoke there was an immense groaning sound from up above. Cold dread surged through Amelia’s veins. The sound was like nothing she had ever heard before and something told her that the end was near.

Her whole body was shaking as she lifted her phone above her head and looked up. The roof of the carriage was sagging and buckled. It was on the point of collapsing.

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. She looked along the carriage. The sagging roof extended as far as she could see.

The groaning sound again. Louder this time. The roof sagged a little more.

Amelia Howard was not a religious woman. She hadn’t been to church since she was a child. But now she fell to her knees with her head bowed, and whispered a prayer. She knew she was going to die and so she didn’t pray for life. She simply prayed that her death wouldn’t hurt too much.

She was still praying when the roof collapsed, but her prayer was not answered. Countless tons of rubble crushed down on top of her. She felt the unspeakable agony of bones breaking along her spine while her arms and legs shattered like brittle twigs. Her head was crushed between the floor of the carriage and the weight above her. She screamed in pain, but the scream was muffled by her coffin of earth. She tried to breathe in, but instead of air she swallowed a throatful of dust. Her mouth filled up with blood and the world went dim.

The end, when it came, was a mercy. Not just for Amelia Howard, but for everybody else in her carriage, who just happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

The emergency services were speedy and efficient. But there was very little they could do.

Within minutes of the blast, the entire tube network had been evacuated. A cordon had been fixed around Pimlico Station. Ambulances, police cars and fire appliances clogged the surrounding roads, and the sirens of others approaching filled the air. Rescue workers wearing hard hats and oxygen masks bravely strode down the underpass that led into the station. Others walked out, their clothes and skin covered in grime and their faces utterly shocked. None of them had ever seen such sights before.

There were other vehicles too. Unmarked SUVs from which plainclothes anti-terrorist officers exited with grim faces. Helicopters circled up above. A news crew had already arrived and was forcing its way through the crowd of onlookers standing by the cordon while five police officers shouted at them to keep their distance. One man, however – he had shoulder-length grey hair, green eyes and smelled of cherry tobacco – approached the cordon, lifted it over his head and stepped towards the blast site. A police officer ran up to him and was clearly just about to scream at him to get back behind the cordon when the man waved an ID card in his face.

The police officer’s eyes widened and he stood almost to attention. ‘All right, sir. Please go on.’

The grey-haired man gave the policeman a vague nod, then continued towards the underpass. When he was five metres away, he stopped. He looked lost in thought as he watched the fledgling rescue operation unfold. When it became clear that the emergency services were not carrying out the living on their stretchers, but the dead, he bowed his head, sighed and walked back to the cordon.

‘Can I be of assistance, Mr Bartholomew?’ asked the officer who had tried to stop him coming in.

Mr Bartholomew smiled a wan, thankful smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Go back to your position.’

And as he walked away, the collar of his coat pulled up against the early morning chill, he thought, but did not say:
Nobody can do anything for the poor souls down there now. It’s the living who need our help
.

2

ADVANCE/RETREAT

ON A BLEAK
, remote island somewhere off the northern coast of Scotland, a lesson was taking place. The pupil was no longer a boy, but not yet a man. He had an adult’s responsibilities, however. Some days they weighed more heavily on his shoulders than others. Today was one of those days.

Zak Darke’s body ached. As Amelia Howard had been making her final journey from Brixton tube station, and most other boys his age had been drowsily hoping for a few more minutes’ sleep before school, Zak had been starting his punishing daily workout. After that kind of beasting, most people would take the day off. Not Zak. His day was only just beginning.

The room in which the lesson was taking place was on the ground floor of St Peter’s House, the desolate stone mansion that the boy had come to think of as home. There was a circular oak table in the middle of the room, and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a windswept landscape towards a choppy grey ocean. Zak stood at the window, staring out to sea. Unlike most students, whose distant gazes meant they were bored, Zak was deep in thought as he watched the rain whipping the remote island of St Peter’s Crag. It was the middle of June, but the seasons meant nothing here. It seemed to rain all the time. There were no other pupils in this classroom, but there were two teachers: a young woman with white-blonde, shoulder-length hair, and a rugged-looking man, also blond and with a plain, square face and a flat nose. Since the death of Zak’s parents in Africa – innocent victims of a vicious drugs magnate – and his recruitment as an agent, Gabs and Raf, Zak’s Guardian Angels, had become his instructors, protectors and family all rolled into one. They both sat at the oak table.

‘Nice hairpin,’ Zak said to Gabs as he wandered back to the table.

Gabs’s fingers reached up to touch the pin clipped to her hair. It was the size of a fifty-pence coin and fashioned in the shape of a star. ‘Flattery will get you everywhere, sweetie,’ she said, a flicker of pleasure crossing her lips. ‘But how about we stay focused on our lesson, hey?’

Zak inclined his head. ‘I still don’t get it,’ he said. ‘How could they just let people die?’

‘Because sometimes in war you have to make difficult decisions,’ said Raf with a shrug. ‘Don’t tell me that’s news to you.’

‘I’ve never been in a war.’ Zak knew he sounded grumpy, but he couldn’t help it. This particular lesson was leaving a bad taste in his mouth.

Gabs gave him a gentle smile. ‘Wrong, Zak,’ she said. ‘You’ve just never been in the army. People like us are at war all the time. Nobody reads about it in the newspapers, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.’

Zak sighed, stood up and started pacing around the room. ‘So let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘It’s the Second World War and the Germans have a secret code called Enigma that the British have managed to crack. British Intelligence intercepts a message stating that the Germans are about to bomb Coventry. If they evacuate the city, the Germans will realize they’ve cracked the Enigma, so they allow the bombing to go ahead and hundreds of people to die.’

‘In a nutshell, yes,’ said Raf.

Zak shook his head. ‘It’s wrong,’ he stated.

‘It saved lives in the long run. If the Germans had worked out that the British had cracked the Enigma code, we’d probably have lost the war.’

‘It’s still wrong.’

‘Maybe we should just move on,’ Gabs suggested. ‘Nobody really knows if that story’s true, anyway. Raf was only telling you to illustrate a point.’

‘What point?’

‘That codes are important. Governments and intelligence agencies spend millions every year on encryption and decryption software more advanced than a human mind could ever hope to achieve. Phone calls across the Atlantic are constantly monitored for trigger words. And, of course, the same goes for emails. To avoid it, you need very advanced encryption. When you’re in the field, though, you’re unlikely to have access to that kind of technology. You need to know how to send messages safely, and have a fighting chance of decoding enemy communications if need be.’