Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 (20 page)

Enter password. Warning: incorrect password will trigger immediate system erase
.

Zak cursed. It meant he only had a single guess. Then he remembered: he also had something to go on.

Zak removed his phone from his pocket. He swiped the screen, entered his passcode and navigated to his videos. The last piece of footage he had taken had been in the basement of the
Daily Post
as Darren the IT guy logged on to Ludgrove’s work system. Was it possible that Ludgrove used the same password for both systems? There was only one way to find out.

Zak replayed the video paying close attention to the IT guy’s fingers. He was touch-typing as he entered the password, and as far as Zak could tell it was eight characters long. He watched the footage again, paying close attention to which finger typed each character. He grabbed a scrap of paper and a pencil that were lying on the desk in front of him and, for each character, scribbled down either L or R depending on which hand the IT guy had used, and a number from one to five, depending on which finger.

L3

L2

R4

L2

L2

L3

R2

R4

Once his list was complete he laid his fingers across the middle of the keyboard. He had learned how to touch-type at school in what seemed like another life. He remembered a rather drab teacher telling him that it was like learning a bike – you never forgot once you had learned – and that he’d be glad that he’d taken the time to master it. Zak had rather doubted it at the time. Now he had to concede that his teacher had been right, but not for the reasons anyone could have imagined at the time . . .

The IT guy had inputted the first character of the password with the third finger of his left hand. Zak looked at the keyboard, then wrote down the possible keys it could have been: 3 4 E D C. He did the same thing for the remaining characters until he had a grid of all the possible combinations.

He stared at the characters, knowing that he needed to choose one from each row but unable to see any kind of pattern or keyword. Perhaps Ludgrove’s password was just a random string of letters. If so, Zak had no chance. He only had one attempt to get the right password. He began to panic.

But then, as he stared at the paper in the glow of the computer screen, he saw it. Could it really be that simple?

He circled one letter of each row.

Then he read the highlighted letters from the bottom up: LUDGROVE.

Could the password really be his name spelled backwards? Could it really be that simple? Zak breathed deeply, then carefully typed it in: EVORGDUL

He pressed enter.

The screen went blank.

And then it flickered into life. He was in.

There was no time to congratulate himself. The police could be here at any moment. Zak’s first instinct was to check the list of previously opened documents. It was empty. He cursed silently, and repeated his curse when he saw that the folder labelled ‘My Documents’ was empty. He didn’t have
time
to trawl the whole hard drive looking for information.
Think
, he told himself.
What else do you know?

He opened up a search window and typed in NY HERO.

No results.

He tried to stay calm, to put his mind back to the offices of the
Daily Post
. He hadn’t been sure that the final ‘O’ hadn’t been a ‘D’. He’d put that from his mind because NY HERD meant nothing to him. But now he typed these letters into the search window and pressed enter.

Result.

A link to a single document appeared. Zak double-clicked it, and for the next minute, he did nothing but read.

The document was entitled ‘Richard Sonny Herder’ – NY HERD, he immediately saw, was simply part of that name. The name meant nothing to Zak, at least not until he read through what appeared to be an article Ludgrove was writing.

On 18 June 1973, the British Army committed one of its least glorious, and least known, travesties of justice. Richard ‘Sonny’ Herder was, along with his brother Lee, a highly accomplished bomb-disposal expert working in Northern Ireland during one of the worst periods of the Troubles. Rumours have abounded among Dick Herder’s contemporaries about the manner of his death. Why did the Ministry of Defence go out of its way to cover up Herder’s death and the circumstances surrounding the car bomb that caused it? What is the truth behind the subsequent disappearance of his brother Lee? These secrets have remained buried for forty years. Now, after many months of research, and having spoken to eye witnesses who were there, I can reveal the full, shameful truth of what happened that day. Dick Herder’s death was caused not by his own carelessness, but because he was ordered to defuse a device that he himself had declared unsafe to approach. His story is a shocking indictment of the British Army, and the way it treats the memory of its fallen
.

But it is more than that. It is a story of deception, intrigue and subterfuge
 . . .

Zak wanted to read on, but his attention was suddenly ripped away from the text on the screen. The window of this first-floor office looked out onto the road. And on the road, bathing the study in flashing neon light, were three police cars. He could hear men shouting instructions to each other.

He stood up so abruptly that his chair toppled backwards. He grabbed the canvas bag containing his weapon and hurtled along the landing and down the stairs. There were shadows behind the frosted glass of the front door. As he reached the bottom of the stairs there was a sudden, shocking bang from the doorway. The door rattled in its frame and an image fell into Zak’s head of the police officers on the other side forcing it open with a pneumatic battering ram. He knew it wouldn’t survive another strike, so he didn’t hang around. Seconds later he burst out of the French doors, sprinted the length of the garden and scrambled over the wooden fence at the bottom.

It was only as his feet slammed against the ground that he saw them: three officers, one of them holding an Alsatian on a lead, running down the alleyway in his direction. The dog barked; one of the officers shouted. They were no more than twenty metres away, and closing. Paralysed by panic, Zak stared helpless at them for a second.

The dog barked again.

‘Get on the ground!
Get on the ground!
’

Zak snapped out of his hesitation. A couple of metres behind him were two green wheelie bins. He scrambled on top of them, then hurled himself over the brick wall that formed one side of the alleyway. He fell heavily onto tarmac on the other side, but quickly scrambled to his feet again. He was in the car park of a modern red-brick church. It was deserted at this time of night, so he pelted across it, past the church itself and out on to a busy main road.

He ran for thirty metres, dodging the occasional pedestrian, until he came to a bus stop. The doors of a red, single-decker bus were just closing as Zak ran up to them. He hammered on the door and shouted at the top of his voice: ‘
Please, let me on!
’ For a sickening moment he thought the driver was ignoring him, but then there was a hiss as the doors concertina’d open.

Zak slapped his Oyster card – in the name of Harry Gold – against the reader and scurried down the bus, looking over his shoulder and half expecting to see armed police bearing down on him.

But then the doors hissed closed. As the bus drove away, he staggered to the very end, feeling the glances of the other passengers keenly. It may have been a trick of the light, but he thought he saw a uniformed man with a dog appear at a distance of about twenty metres.

Or maybe it was just a pedestrian. Zak had no way of knowing as he took a seat, placing the canvas bag carefully on his lap. He tried to recall everything he had read on Ludgrove’s computer.
Richard ‘Sonny’ Herder . . . ‘Dick’ to his friends . . . died in a bomb blast 18 June 1973
.

18 June 1973
 . . .

Zak looked at his watch. 1159hrs. With a kind of sick anticipation he watched the seconds tick down.

0000hrs. 18 June.

His mouth went dry. He closed his eyes. His mind was a confused pot of loose ends and half theories, but one fact burned brightly. Today was the fortieth anniversary of Herder’s death. Ludgrove had been writing a story about that death, and if the terrible events of the past few days were linked somehow to that bomb blast of forty years ago, there was no reason not to think that the third bomb could be scheduled for today.

But Ludgrove was dead. He could give him no answers now.

Zak sat there with his eyes shut, thinking carefully about what his next move had to be.

18 JUNE

17

THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT

MIDNIGHT
.

Normally a good, quiet time to be working in a hospital. Not tonight. Tonight it felt as if there were
no
good times to be working in a hospital. Tonight it really did feel like the graveyard shift.

First the underground bomb. Dr Cooper had been on call as the gruesomely injured bodies had been carried into surgery. Three of them had died under his care, and as a doctor it didn’t matter how many lives you saved, it was those you lost that you always remembered.

Then the children’s hospital. There wasn’t a single member of staff here who hadn’t watched the footage on television of its destruction. And there wasn’t a single member of staff who didn’t wonder if
their
place of work was going to be next.

Dr Cooper was no exception. He had come to work today against his better judgement, and hadn’t been surprised to learn that thirty per cent of the staff had called in ‘sick’. In a way he didn’t mind: it meant the day had been so busy that he barely had time to worry about terrorist attacks. Now, though, as he stood in the bright lights of the operating theatre, his face covered by a mask, his hands by skintight latex gloves, he found his mind wandering. He had been appalled by the news of that poor man hanging from Westminster Bridge, and he was appalled now by the sight of the patient in the operating theatre. The man on the table was an elderly man, in his late sixties, perhaps, although his physique was of a man half that age. Perhaps it was this that had enabled him to survive his gun wound, so far. He had shoulder-length grey hair and Dr Cooper had disapprovingly noticed a smell of tobacco about him. He had no name, at least none that anyone had been able to find. No relative had come forward to claim him. There was just an ID card that had made the hospital security staff jumpy. Dr Cooper had had to explain in no uncertain terms to a faceless bureaucrat who seemed to have appeared from nowhere that his patient absolutely couldn’t be moved to another hospital if he had any chance of living. What had happened to the patient, Cooper had no idea. He had just been found, bleeding half to death, by the police after an anonymous tip-off, and rushed into A&E immediately. That meant
someone
knew what had happened, but they were keeping quiet.

Bad things were happening in London. This was one of them. And it felt like the whole capital was holding its breath, waiting to see what was next.

‘Scalpel,’ he said.

The wound was bad. The bullet had punctured the man’s stomach lining and caused a massive amount of internal bleeding. This man was on the brink of death and it looked like being the graveyard shift in more ways than one. Dr Cooper’s eyes flickered towards one of the screens surrounding the operating table. His patient’s vital signs were weak. Low blood pressure. Low pulse. He exchanged a nervous glance with the anaesthetist. ‘It’s not looking good,’ he said. The anaesthetist shook his head.

The scalpel was sharp. It cut with ease through the skin of the old man, and the thin layer of fat beneath. As the blade sliced through his flesh, the man’s blood pressure dropped a couple of points. Dr Cooper carried on with the procedure nonetheless.

It was pitch dark, but it was not entirely silent. The pitter-patter and squeaking of rodents was all around them, and more than once both Raf and Gabs had felt something brush against them. The thought of being surrounded by rats was repulsive, but they barely noticed them. All their attention was focused on the glowing countdown of the digital clock.