Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 (23 page)

‘You’re lucky it didn’t shatter a bone,’ Zak said as he examined the surgeon’s handiwork. The entry wound had been neatly sewn up, but the whole area was bruised and bloodshot, and the wound had started to weep a colourless plasma. Malcolm made occasional hisses of pain as Zak carefully applied a fresh dressing. Once the job was completed, he looked paler than ever. It was clear he needed more medical care than Zak had expertise to give him. It was equally clear that his life was in danger if anybody located him. That meant staying here, for now.

Zak checked the time. It was a little before 3 a.m. His thoughts turned towards Rodney Hendricks. Could it be true that this strange, dumpy little man with thick round glasses and a passion for sparrows could be behind the terror that had raged through London over the past few days? It seemed wildly improbable. Perhaps the anagram was just a fluke. A coincidence.

Zak hit the Internet. He Googled Richard Herder. He quickly identified plenty of people of that name, but they were all very much alive: one was an American real-estate agent, one was a schoolboy, one was a priest in Cornwall. Zak trawled through several pages, trying to find any reference to a former soldier with that name, but he found nothing. Until, that is, he clicked the Images tab.

He found it tucked away on the bottom of the fourth page of results. It was an old photograph, a clipping from a parish magazine of 1971. It showed two young men smiling for the camera, both smartly dressed in military uniform. The caption below read: ‘
Brothers Richard (left) and Lee (right) Herder, photographed on the day of their deployment to Northern Ireland
.’

Zak stared at the picture. They both looked so fresh-faced. Young. Eager to serve. For a moment, Zak couldn’t take his eyes off the picture. The brother on the right had not yet grown a beard, or taken to wearing glasses. He did not yet have a paunch. But there was no doubt about it. Lee Herder was a young Rodney Hendricks.

Zak spun round to where Malcolm was sitting quietly. He had started to shiver again. ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely sure there’s nothing in that crossword? Nothing we’ve missed?’

‘Show it to me again.’

Zak fetched the soggy newspaper and showed Malcolm the crossword. The boy’s eyes flickered rapidly up and down as he examined the grid. ‘Nothing,’ he said after a minute. ‘Trust me.’

Zak
did
trust him. But where did that leave them? Perhaps he’d got it wrong. Perhaps today was not the day that London should expect the third bomb. Somehow he didn’t think so. Hendricks was un-hinged, and today – the anniversary of his brother’s death – would be significant to him. Zak didn’t know why he was planting these coded messages, but Hendricks surely knew by now that someone was on to him, because they had been able to evacuate the hospital before the second bomb detonated. Under those circumstances, it made sense that he had replaced the final crossword with an innocent one. But if so, perhaps he had planted his message elsewhere. And how did that dead-end mews fit into all of this? What was
that
all about? Was that why Ludgrove was dead?

‘Give me the paper,’ he breathed. Malcolm handed it over and Zak flicked through the pages until he reached the nature-notes column. It was tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of a page towards the end of the newspaper, next to an unfunny cartoon and below an advert for mortgages. A passport photo-sized picture of Hendricks peered out from the page. Zak read the copy alongside it.

The Long-tailed Shrike. Quiet, graceful, powerful. Every person near Yarmouth will witness jaw-dropping, Xanadu-like tails, unbelievably splendid swooping and diving as flocks of this rare bird, seldom seen in the British Isles, swarm to the south coast of the United Kingdom
 . . .

‘The long-tailed shrike,’ he murmured. He remembered his morning in the newsroom less than twenty-four hours ago. The editor had insisted that Hendricks write a piece for today’s paper on the effect the second bomb had had on the wildlife of the city. Hendricks had insisted that he wanted to write about this obscure bird, but then had appeared to back down. And yet, here it was, the article he had been so eager to print?

Why?

There could only be one reason.

Zak cursed under his breath. He should have known all along. Xanadu-like tails? A phrase like that didn’t even make sense. Hendricks had to have put it in there for some other reason. He handed the newspaper to Malcolm. ‘It’s here,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The message. It’s somewhere in this article. Hendricks insisted on printing something about the long-tailed shrike – it’s a bird. Why would he care so much, if he’s in the middle of a bombing campaign?’

Malcolm took the newspaper and looked at the article. His eyes started flickering again until, after about twenty seconds, they widened.

‘I need a pen,’ he said.

Zak grabbed a pencil and a pad from a nearby desk and handed them to the pale-faced boy. Instantly he started writing.

‘What’s the cipher?’ Zak breathed.

Malcolm didn’t answer. Instead, like the system of using the initial letters of down clues in the crosswords, he circled the first letters of the next sixteen words of the article, counting hyphenated words as just one word each. Zak tried to decode it in his head.
L=11, Q=16, add them together you get 27, which is a B
 . . . But he was a thousand times slower than Malcolm, who was already writing down the decoded message on the pad in his thin, spidery writing.

He underlined the message once. Zak stared at it. Then he stared at Malcolm. Then he stared out over the London skyline.

‘Are you sure it’s right?’ he asked Malcolm.

‘I’m sure,’ said the boy.

Zak closed his eyes and did everything he could to stem the panic rising in his gut. He opened them again and double-checked what Malcolm had written.

He blinked. His mouth went dry. They had discovered the location of the third bomb. If Zak was reading the signs right, the blast would happen today. And it could happen at any minute . . .

19

CHALKER MEWS

RAF AND GABS’S
abductor had returned.

‘I trust the passing of a few hours has made the decision-making process a little easier for you,’ he said. He shone the torch in the direction of the digital clock face, though he needn’t have. They had been watching it glow in the dark for hours, silently willing time to slow down.

‘You know what?’ Gabs said. She was doing what she could to sound upbeat, but her voice rasped and she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

‘Enlighten me,’ said the man.

‘We
have
come to a decision.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

‘And our decision is,’ Gabs continued, ‘that we’d rather eat worms than tell a sicko like you anything.’

The man smiled. ‘How ironic,’ he said, a slight edge to his voice. ‘Because in reality it is the worms that will be eating you in, oh, approximately fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds. You won’t be their only meal, of course, but you’ll be their closest.’

‘Not if—’

‘QUIET!’ he roared suddenly. And then, in a much milder voice, he continued, ‘I understand your game. You wish to goad me into moving close to you. Then you hope to wrestle me onto the pressure pad and yourself off it. But rest assured, my dear lady, I won’t allow that to happen.’

Gabs threw him a look of utter loathing, but the man seemed immune to it.

‘Why?’ Raf asked quietly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Why are you doing this? What can you possibly hope to gain from all this slaughter?’

‘Satisfaction!’ the man snapped. ‘After all these years!’

‘All these years of what?’ Raf’s voice was measured and calm – a stark contrast to the bomber’s, which was shrill and excitable.

‘All these years of loneliness!’

‘And you think killing people is going to earn you friends?’

The bomber spat in contempt. ‘I don’t
want
friends. My brother was my only friend, and he was taken from me years ago. I swore I would avenge him.’ He looked upwards. ‘And now I will.’ He started to edge away from them, into the darkness.

‘Tell me about your brother,’ Raf persisted.

The bomber stopped. ‘He was more of a man than you.’

‘What was his name?’

‘
What does it matter to you?
’ the bomber hissed. But then, almost unable to stop himself, he said: ‘His name was Richard.’

‘He sounds like quite a guy,’ Raf breathed.

‘He deserved better.’

‘What happened to him, mate?’

The question seemed to tip the bomber over the edge. ‘You don’t know what happened to him, because they covered it up!’

‘Who covered it up?’ Raf pressed.

‘The army. The government. Everyone!’ The bomber glanced at the clock ticking down. 00:58:03. It was almost as if he was deciding whether he had the time to tell his story. ‘We were the best,’ he said, whispering now and taking a step towards Raf and Gabs. ‘He taught me everything I knew about bomb disposal, but together we were the best.’

Another step forward.

‘There was a car bomb. Northern Ireland. We knew it was too dangerous to defuse. We walked away. But some Rupert forced him into it. Said he’d get someone else in. Richard knew that if anyone else tried it, they’d die, so he went in.’

‘That was brave,’ said Raf.

‘It was more than brave,’ the bomber snapped. ‘They should have given him a medal. A proper military funeral. They didn’t. They wrote him out of history to keep it quiet.’ A pause. ‘But they’re paying now.’

He was standing five metres from Raf.

‘What’s your name, mate?’ Raf said.

‘What does it matter?’

‘It matters to me.’

‘Fine,’ the bomber said. ‘Call me Rodney.’ His voice changed suddenly. ‘Rodney Hendricks,’ he said in a self-mocking voice. ‘Birds this, nature that . . . everyone thinks Rodney’s a fool, but none of them saw through my little disguise. And birds can kill. Even something as insignificant as a little chaffinch.’ He started laughing, as if at some private joke. If he noticed the glance Raf and Gabs gave each other, he made no sign of it.

‘Rodney,’ Raf said. ‘Where are we? You might as well tell us, if we’re going to die anyway.’

Hendricks stopped laughing. ‘I found my way down here years ago,’ he said. ‘I’ve been planning this ever since but until now I had no funds to pursue my aims. That changed, and my little conflagration on the underground killed many people, while destroying the hospital was spectacular, but believe me, nobody will forget today.’

‘Where are we, Rodney?’ Raf repeated.

‘Underneath the Palace.’ He pointed at the ten crates of explosives. ‘There’s enough here to bring the building crumbling in on itself. My brother fought for Queen and country. They betrayed him, so what better way is there to avenge him?’

Hendricks was breathing deeply. There was excitement in his voice. He stood there for a moment, looking not at Raf and Gabs, but at the crates.

‘Why the crosswords, Rodney? What made you want to send those coded messages.’